Mauricio Pochettino has already received high praise from U.S. men’s national team left back Antonee Robinson and midfielder Yunus Musah added his name to the list of players excited by the potential idea of working with the longtime manager.
Pochettino has been linked with the USMNT head coaching vacancy throughout the summer, with recent reports already confirming the Argentine’s hiring. However, U.S. Soccer has not officially announced the hiring with Pochettino reportedly being unable to sign a contract due to his former club Chelsea still owing him wages from last season.
Pochettino’s move to the USMNT would be a marquee hire for the federation ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which will be on U.S., Mexican, and Canadian soil.
Musah, a former England youth national team player, switched his allegiance to the USMNT in 2020 and since has earned 39 caps to date. The New York-born midfielder is in the midst of his second season with Serie A side AC Milan after previously breaking through with Spanish club Valencia.
Although his focus remains on AC Milan’s upcoming league match with Parma this weekend, Musah couldn’t help but voice his excitement on the possible opportunity to work with a premier coach in Pochettino.
“Honestly, when I saw the news, it was nice to see that a manager like Pochettino [who’s] coached a lot of top teams, agreed to coach for us,” Musah told CBS Sports Golazo’s Morning Footy show. “I don’t think it’s official yet or whatever but if he becomes our manager, I feel like he’ll be able to help a lot. He’s a manager that’s worked with top players so he definitely has a lot of things he trusts.
“We need to also take accountability,” he said when asked about the USMNT’s poor Copa America showing. “At the end of the day, we have a manager that comes in, we have to also push on, you know?”
The USMNT returns to action this September in a pair of home friendlies vs. Canada and New Zealand. Should Pochettino’s hiring become official, he isn’t expected to be on the sidelines for either September match, but could begin his new role in October against Panama and Mexico.
“my point would be the mediocre U23s read like a GB selection and if varas gets to pick september, same diff. people can make lame excuses for caretaker continuity but how many months has the old coach been fired for?”
In the old days people would say you jump to conclusions.
What is wrong with a provisional roster for the September friendlies?
I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you and Varas did not work on the selections together. So you won’t know his reasoning for his selections. Gregg was canned on July 10, 2024. As I’ve said elsewhere, you seem to think that Varas. like all coaches associated with the former El Jefe, is some kind of Berhalter Renfield. So, you’ve jumped to the conclusion Varas will pick Berhalter “guys” and use Berhalter tactics for the September friendlies. Coach like a miniME Gregg. Why the fuck would he do that? Master vampire Gregg has been staked. He can’t hurt Varas anymore. If Varas is smart, he’s going to use this time to inject some of his own ideas and show us and other potential suitors what he’s got.
You’ve forgotten Gregg assistant BJ. The man who showed us what the same players could look like if properly unleashed?
It would be pretty shocking if the September roster(s) did not look very familiar to all of us. Six weeks or so is not much time for new players to emerge.
With Gregg out of contract Varas used a 3-4-3 in U20 WC not Gregg’s preferred 4-3-3, so there is a history of Mikey being his own man.
running interference for the status quo as usual, i see.
historically we used to replace guys during camp for performance or injury reasons. i think you per usual are fudging what a fussy team could legally require with what might happen in action. in short, confusing “can” with “must.” i think under GB he’d prefer to passively play short than ask a team for a favor. and we thus got pushed around by club teams, who even had healthy players declining calls. so forgive me for not playing along with the broad pretense you adhere to that GB’s varied processes and approaches to things were optimized.
also, you neglect that 15 days before a match resets for each game. this isn’t a tournament roster. this is a series of individual friendlies. i’ve seen other teams, such as italy, call up a whole new team for a later game in a window. you may remember how we kind of handled canada and cuba in 2019. cuba was a deliberately more youthful lineup.
second, callaghan’s innovations were not so much roster, as he basically mirrored GB and hudson on first/second team choices. his “innovation” was playing reyna as a sole 10. who was already in the rosters just debatably doghoused. he then seemed to tell the team to just play.
but those tactics didn’t work with the B team, nor did that same A team accomplish much at copa. so implying this previous coach did sweeping changes to which the team reacted is a fib. nor did what he did “stick.” if anything it gave false promise. by the next year’s version of the tournament the same group chased jamaica most of the game.
it’s laughable circular reasoning to suggest varas and the olympic guy will indulge in dramatically different names and looks when they basically presided over a similar set of guys who played U20 then U23. you could literally make this argument of any “new” coach — that it will magically be tweaked and fixed — except i think we’re less likely to see wholesale changes under a pipeline man. neither personnel nor tactics. to be fair, i think some guys like yow or paredes might help. and i expect varas to call someone like cowell. but i hardly see that a bunch of that cohort, plus the old senior team bunch, doing anything. i expect his adds would be guys who already were on last year’s meh B team.
for example, do you see them taking a risk on, say, campbell? nope. dual nationals, truly fresh faces? nah. be real with me.
last, where did the cult of varas and the olympic team even start? i could understand trumpeting the 2019 U20 team or something like that. but those two teams were fairly meh. but of course, they will come in and fix it all. age group coaches and assistants are going to fix what a MLS coach does wrong that we are trying to hire an EPL guy to sort out. sure.
if i remember varas’ teams, his naive tactics got countered like crazy for easy goals, and his premise was hitting diagonals from the back as outlets, then holding the ball there to bring the rest up. what do you think the odds are, minus weah, of us successfully outrunning canada and panama to lofted kickballs? you know, try and win footraces with davies. good luck with that.
I don’t know about dissing Varas’s U20 teams he played 12 competitive matches
-Concacaf Qualifying
31-2 GD 6-1-0 (w-t-l) 6 clean sheets
-World Cup
9-2 GD 4-0-1 4 clean sheets
-Combined 10-1-1 40-4 GD 10 clean sheets.
-His only loss was to the eventual world champions.
IV,
“it’s laughable circular reasoning to suggest varas and the olympic guy will indulge in dramatically different names and looks when they basically presided over a similar set of guys who played U20 then U23. you could literally make this argument of any “new” coach — that it will magically be tweaked and fixed — except i think we’re less likely to see wholesale changes under a pipeline man. neither personnel nor tactics. to be fair, i think some guys like yow or paredes might help. and i expect varas to call someone like cowell. but i hardly see that a bunch of that cohort, plus the old senior team bunch, doing anything.”
Really? Yow, Paredes, Cowell, and of course your new savior, Campbell, this is the new wave of previously ignored troops who will save the USMNT and vault them back to dominance? Who are the other seven?
Why are you forgetting your old standbys, Julian Green and Duane Holmes?
If Pochettino wants to start those four I got no problem with that other than the fact that we have better players than them.
You seem to be intimately familiar with Gregg’s negotiations w/ various clubs for various players. Were you there or do you have an internal
source?
Your white hot hatred for Varas ( did he kill your dog or something?) is quite curious. You act as if he’s going to destroy the program if he gets to coach these upcoming friendlies. The reality is that you don’t know how much responsibility he will have for what is going to happen in them. Odds are that it won’t be a whole lot. Interim literally means temporary.
It seems like Pochettino is doing a lot on remote, which is something most of us would probably do and makes perfect sense.
There’s always a provisional roster, FIFA regulations require you inform clubs in writing if you are planning on calling up players at least 15 days prior to the start of the window. The window starts Sept 2 so they would have been due. They just aren’t usually released. Sometimes a club’s PR department will say a player has been selected but the Federations usually don’t say anything until the final selection. Varas and Crocker would have selected the 30-50 prospective players for the list. Poch agreed to take the position last weekend so while his lawyers are ironing out the compensation details he’ll have been going over the list for his 23-26. It won’t likely be as expansive as IV would like, but he’ll have some say in the group even if he isn’t managing on the field a la Hayes last Winter.
you can mock me all you like but we just got drubbed out of copa and the more familiar the camp feels the less value it will have. why do you keep insisting on variations on a theme of a set of personnel who can’t get it done in anything other than concacaf, which is in a down ebb relative to the world.
and where does it say every call sheet has to be a first choice designed to win that soccer game, as opposed to a tryout camp where we test the assumption we even know correctly what that first choice is.
personally i have suggested on here before go back to the old model where it would be (january aside) 75-80% continuity, some starters rested and left off, and several noobs each time.
like someplace between A and B exploring who belongs which side of the line. right now we like absurdly treat a unit as A whether it wins or not. how does the abstraction of thinking that’s the team override how it looks and the results it gets? in science, you had a hypothesis, it didn’t work. try something else.
Sorry page 64 of FIFA’s Official Document titled “Regulations on the status and transfer of players”
Annex 1 Section 3 Item 2. It’s very clear. You must notify clubs 15 days prior to the start of a window, not the day of a match they will play in. So if you were calling in two separate rosters for two matches you must notify all clubs and players involved 15 days before the start of the window. A player who is brought in as an injury replacement and their club are notified that they may be called in.
————————
I wasn’t mocking you just providing facts of how the process works.
you’re confusing a rule with someone wanting to enforce it. the rule is intended for a potentially crybaby team that wants to refuse. i send them a 15 day letter not a thing they can do if he’s healthy. example, i stop at the stop sign, the cop can’t pull me over.
but i can have an injury problem and call columbus and nothing says they have to require 15 days. they could cooperate. they have the right to insist on 15 days IF THEY WANT. i california roll the stop sign. no cop is there. nothing happens. or a cop is there but he’s a friend. he ignores it or gives me a warning. and unlike a tournament deadline, panama can’t pout when a guy got called. “but, wait, 15 days……” it’s not for their benefit. it’s between columbus and i. if columbus doesn’t care, it’s not a roster deadline, it’s a notice rule.
last point, “and i am just pointing out facts,” but we routinely let teams talk us out of calling people for summer or fall stuff “to bed players in their new club.” i want you to show me where in the rules that is. oh, it isn’t in there. so you see where we can do favors either direction, NT or club. that it was often one-way traffic benefitting the clubs speaks to GB’s softness. they got players they shouldn’t have been able to deny, while we get a bunch of literal lawyers saying “but the rule says,” or concerned about the ethics of calling dual nationals with choices. we can be a little more aggressive until someone says no, dude.
you also referred to it as a provo roster which hints at one workaround for your reading of the rule. the rule literally says “wishing to call up a player.” so you “wish to call” 30-35 guys, so their teams are on notice, then announce 23 or so, factoring in injuries. you send the other 7-12 apologies “but hey you get to keep your player for the window.” there are your injury replacements. i still think you could ask MLS for performance related ones as well. they could say no, and some teams might, but it’s an excuse to say no not an absolute roster rule.
it would then help if we monitored emerging health situations better than your average fanboy seems capable. or didn’t call hurt people.
“you also referred to it as a provo roster which hints at one workaround for your reading of the rule. the rule literally says “wishing to call up a player.” so you “wish to call” 30-35 guys, so their teams are on notice, then announce 23 or so, factoring in injuries. you send the other 7-12 apologies”
-that’s literally what I said in my original comment.
“ Varas and Crocker would have selected the 30-50 prospective players for the list. Poch agreed to take the position last weekend so while his lawyers are ironing out the compensation details he’ll have been going over the list for his 23-26.”
re poch it’s gotta be the wages after he was fired not last season’s. my understanding is at least part of what CFC wants to do is limit how much shows up on their FFP this year since this is the 3rd manager they have fired lately and each one is costing them $10m+ to drop. maybe we’re cooking up some sort of deferred compensation concept where we pay the man more a year and CFC pays us the difference but over 2 years or more. but the article sounds like USSF is now negotiating with CFC right alongside his mr. 10% to move this along.
re USMNT, the linked article says “Varas has already selected the provisional roster sent to clubs to inform them that their players are being considered for September’s international window….” since when is there a provo roster for a friendly? but anyhow, my point would be the mediocre U23s read like a GB selection and if varas gets to pick september, same diff. people can make lame excuses for caretaker continuity but how many months has the old coach been fired for?