How Mauricio Pochettino taught his team to win

A bowl of lemons sits on a desk in the convention room Mauricio Pochettino has turned into an workplace at the U.S. males’s soccer team’s beachfront resort in south Orange County. The citrus fruit, the coach believes, has the non secular capacity to take in unfavorable vitality. On the nook of another desk, the flame from a candle glints.

“I like candles,” says Pochettino, who believes they release therapeutic fragrances and create a calming surroundings.

But it’s the large, blood-red mural protecting the whole south facet of the room that really reveals what Pochettino believes. In the middle of the wall, just behind the coach’s desk, white block letters spell out “Why Not” above a script “U.S.,” which, despite the durations, is supposed to be read as “us.”

Pochettino has turned the query in a mantra for a World Cup team that has answered it with two wins in as many video games and has a probability to win a third match in the match for the first time when it meets Turkey at SoFi Stadium on Thursday.

The concept got here to him during a team assembly last November when he sensed his gamers had doubts about their upcoming World Cup run. So Pochettino turned those doubts into a query. If South Korea may come from nowhere and make the semifinals of the 2002 World Cup, and if Morocco may do the same 4 years in the past in Qatar, why not the U.S.?

Why not us?

“Hey, come on, guys, are you listening to me?” Pochettino said he requested the group. “We need to believe.”

Before he may persuade his gamers, however, he had to persuade himself. And that might need been the toughest half.

The 54-year-old Pochettino is a benevolent Svengali with a whistle; Ted Lasso with an Argentine accent. Belief isn’t so a lot a idea for him as it’s a means of life. But when he and his teaching employees took over the U.S. team in the autumn of 2024, following its disastrous efficiency in the Copa América, he said he inherited a demoralized, dispirited group.

“We received a big bang,” Pochettino said, mimicking a punch to the face. “We were knock[ed] out for a while.”

“We were so naive,” he continued. “The situation was way worse than we really believed.”

Pochettino refused to change the system that has introduced him success at European golf equipment Tottenham, Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea. So he set out to change the gamers instead. That would take time, one thing he had little or no of since he took over with the World Cup just 20 months away.

“It’s difficult to analyze the process, you know,” Pochettino said during an casual, 40-minute dialogue at his team’s Dana Point resort, the solar setting over the ocean through the open patio doorways of his workplace.

“When you put the seed on the soil, [the] first seed, you don’t see nothing. Then you start to grow the tree. It was difficult to explain the plant because it’s not easy.”

The seed Pochettino planted with the national team took time to sprout. He misplaced 5 of his first 10 video games, including a disastrous four-game stretch that included Nations League losses to Panama and Canada in the spring of 2025. The team’s supporters revolted, but Pochettino rejoiced.

“What happened, that was [a] good crash,” he said. “When we detect all the problems, we go for the solution. And we knew that the solution will arrive. The object is to challenge people.”

So he stayed the course.

“That was the process. Now is not a coincidence,” he said of the team’s success.

Pochettino has long believed that building a roster isn’t about choosing the best gamers, but selecting the correct gamers. Players who match his tactical strategy, gamers who get along with one another, gamers who contribute to the team chemistry.

For him, the human connection, human respect is as important — if not more important — than the flexibility to dribble through tight areas. And those traits are notably important in a World Cup since the team will spend every day together for six weeks or more.

Although Pochettino’s team consists of 13 holdovers from the 2022 World Cup roster, it also consists of 5 gamers who made their national team debuts in the last 18 months.

Sometimes, he concluded, it’s simpler to merely change the participant than it’s to change what the participant thinks or believes. And the newbies have completely purchased in.

“We’re all in total belief. We’re all totally supportive and have faith in the process that he’s been outlining,” said goalkeeper Matt Freese, who made his first look for the national team more than 12 months in the past and now is beginning in a World Cup. “Our task was to keep believing, keep working hard and keep trusting. And we did that. We fully bought into the process.”

That course of has made Pochettino the first U.S. coach to win a group stage in 16 years while his two victories in as many video games match Bruce Arena, the most profitable World Cup coach in U.S. historical past, who managed eight video games over two tournaments.

The lemons and candles Pochettino retains in his workplace are manifestations of energia common or common vitality, a foundational idea common to many Eastern philosophies that imagine a basic life pressure connects all issues. Pochettino said he has long felt this connection and it has been a foundational half of his teaching.

But it doesn’t stop with the candles and citrus fruit. Pochettino also has stuffed the mural behind his desk with inspirational sayings.

“The talent has brought us here, but it is heart, effort and unity that will make us unforgettable,” one reads.

“If I dream of touching the moon, maybe I can get close to it. If I only dream of getting close, I’ll stay on Earth,” another says.

Each ends with the coach’s initials, related to the way in which a painter indicators his portraits.

Pochettino’s religion in the ability of fruit and candles and his penchant for penning aphorisms hasn’t taken away from the ferociousness of his strategy to soccer. Many gamers say the training classes under Pochettino — that are intricate, targeted and extremely bodily — are regularly more intense than the video games. But most also are punctuated with laughter.

“Training is still very competitive, it’s very intense,” said midfielder Max Arfsten, who made his national team debut under Pochettino last 12 months. “That’s the culture that the coaches created. Everyone’s still trying to prove something.”

Although Pochettino has spent his life in Argentina and Europe and still splits his time between homes in Barcelona and London, flying to the U.S. for matches and training camps, he’s been a fast examine in this nation’s tradition and quirks.

“One of the things that we really like, and we learn from you, is in the way that you approach life. It’s more casual than formal,” said the coach, whose English is still a work in progress. “People are very approachable and make you feel comfortable. That, for me, was a massive surprise. You always want to welcome people.

“Even the music, even the food. People say ‘no, Americans have crazy food.’ Yes, you have crazy food. But also you have Whole Foods. In Europe, you don’t have a Whole Foods.”

And Pochettino has adopted it all. He’s grow to be a big fan of nation artist Lainey Wilson, went to hear Teddy Swims, a uniquely American genre-blending singer, last winter in New York, and is studying the phrases to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the unofficial victory anthem of the World Cup team.

Perhaps more important, at occasions he’s taken his lemons and his candles and pushed them apart, changing them with another distinctly American trait: the in-your-face confidence to will your self to victory from the most hopeless conditions.

It’s how Americans received at Valley Forge even before they had been Americans and how they received on the seashores of Normandy when the idea of America was threatened. It’s how Americans went to the moon and invented the web.

And it’s how Pochettino’s team has remained good two video games into the World Cup.

“We’re American. We don’t take s—,” midfielder Sebastian Berhalter said Pochettino told the team during one assembly. “Even though he’s Argentinian, he has that mindset of, ‘Look, this is what we do. This is who we are. This is what America’s about.’ Even from an outside perspective, he showed us Americans what we’re about.

“He really drills that into us.”

For a long time Americans have measured World Cup success in advancing past the group stage. Pochettino entered this summer season’s match predicting a run to the semifinals, runs like South Korea and Morocco made.

“When people believe in each other, impossible dreams become possible,” reads another message the coach has scratched onto the wall of his workplace.

Why not us?