IRVINE, Calif. — At so many points over the last year, Mauricio Pochettino had to ask people to trust in what he was doing and let his process play out.
The decision to use last summer’s Gold Cup as a testing ground was, in some part, foisted on him — Christian Pulisic declined to go, others were injured or playing in the Club World Cup — but bringing in 14 players with five or fewer caps instead of something as close as possible to his best team was Pochettino’s decision.
At so many points before and after, the Nations League last March, the South Korea loss last September, this team looked nowhere. The clock was ticking. The identity, as late as this March, hadn’t fallen into place.
Now, after winning consecutive games at the World Cup for the first time in 96 years and clinching its group with one game still to play?
Look through the roster from the Gold Cup. Matt Freese, Alex Freeman and Sebastian Berhalter all came to that camp with zero caps for the senior national team. All three played in both of the first two World Cup games; Freese is their starting goalkeeper, Freeman scored in the 2-0 win against Australia on Friday and Pochettino said he “has potential to be one of the best players in his position in the world.”
The tactical growing pains, the culture Pochettino sacrificed multiple camps to instill? It was all done to make sure the USMNT would arrive at the World Cup ready, and here they are: a flexible, versatile group that can lose Pulisic to injury, play in a two-striker setup it hasn’t used before and be at ease.
“Someone had asked me after the South Korea game my thoughts on that, and very immediately [I] said we’re all in total belief,” Freese said. “We’re all totally supportive and have faith in the process he’s been outlining to us. Our task was to keep believing, keep working hard, keep trusting and we did that. I don’t think at any point — there was never questions, anything like that.”
Pochettino can put Malik Tillman deep in a defensive midfield partnership with Tyler Adams, build his tactical setup around Sergiño Dest being on the wing with Alex Freeman behind him as a third centerback, and start Ricardo Pepi alongside Folarin Balogun up top.
No one but no one had any of that on their bingo cards a year ago. But this is why the U.S. Soccer opened its checkbooks — or rather, its donors’ checkbooks — to bring in an accomplished manager with Pochettino’s tactical acumen.
(By the way, AC Milan hired a manager last week, Ruben Amorim. Now would be a good time for Ken Griffin to reach into his pocket again, if it’s not hurting too bad from the mayor’s pied-a-terre tax.)
Until now, the USMNT’s potential and talent has always been more of an idea than something truly realized. There was a Nations League win in 2021, a Gold Cup win the same year, a promising World Cup in 2022, plenty of players doing things at their club teams that made you believe, plenty of points where they looked like the top dog in CONCACAF.
But they never looked — they never came that close to looking — like a team that could make a real run at a World Cup, or beat some of the best countries in the world. The collection of names was impressive. The collective was just OK.
“I think if we want to win and we want to be one of the good teams, dreaming big, I think we all need to talk about the team,” Pochettino said. “About the U.S. national team, and not the names.”
Pochettino unlocked something on the field that wasn’t there until his 26-man roster showed up in New York just under a month ago. The U.S. still needs that elusive statement, upset win to announce itself, but what this team has accomplished so far in rendering its final group game a dead rubber, beating Paraguay and Australia emphatically and with tactical style, is a better foundation for belief than this program has had, possibly, ever.
“It’s just a building thing,” captain Tim Ream said. “There’s not one specific moment. You take moments from all the games, from all the training sessions and you build with it. … You start to realize and put things together that, you know what, we have all the tools, all the pieces to do what we want to do and what’s being asked of us.”
We don’t know where this run ends, when Pulisic will be back, whether this team will ultimately fulfill its potential.
What we do know is that the potential is no longer on paper. We’ve seen it now. This team, under this manager, can do something special.