USMNT 2025 Gold Cup: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly for Pochettino
Mauricio Pochettino might have overachieved at the Gold Cup with a reserve roster, but there aren't many signs he can do that a year from now at the World Cup.
I detailed already my thoughts about what U.S. Soccer has been doing for this cycle before the Gold Cup. I took the federation to task for basically submarining an entire cycle on the field and as a host country on top of that.
Technically this is actually the second time. They did the same thing with Klinsmann before the 2018 World Cup too.
That being said, finishing as runner up in the Gold Cup was fine, given the results from the two pre-Gold Cup friendlies in losses to Turkey and Switzerland, the latter completely outclassing the USA. Pochettino is now 0-5 against Top 30 FIFA teams and an 0-3 mark against Mexico and Canada dating back to a friendly loss to El Tri last October.
Losing the Gold Cup Final to Mexico while getting outplayed by their largely A-team roster is not the end of the world. Still not having answers to the same questions this team had before Pochettino is a major problem.
THE GOOD
Chris Richards was sensational throughout this tournament and for my money, the team MVP. Yes, Diego Luna and Malik Tillman were very good up until the final, with Tillman in particular throwing his name into the mixer for a full-time starting role leading up to next summer. Luna certainly could play a role but I think winger is too loaded for him to breakthrough into the starting lineup next year.
Aside from that, there were a lot of performances that were just fine. Patrick Agyemang did a lot of great things to help connect play but like every other striker, struggled to finish. Sebastian Berhalter was tremendous on set pieces, and I think the standout as the positive from the central midfield group.
Matt Freese was great in the penalty shootout against Costa Rica and had a few good saves but I don’t think he cemented a roster spot for next summer. And Tim Ream was Tim Ream, and if he’s the extra/ninth defender on this roster for the World Cup I have nothing against that, but the fact that no one else was able to take a starting role from him at 37 for a Gold Cup is concerning.
THE BAD
This is going to be pretty much everything else that just…wasn’t good. It wasn’t, perhaps incredibly bad, but I wouldn’t call these things strengths or positives either. The ongoing issue of the USMNT’s style and tactics certainly wasn’t solved by having a B team play in the team’s final competitive games before the World Cup.
The midfield in general was not overly impressive; Tyler Adams playing with an injury did not help. Johnny Cardoso continues his enigmatic performances despite being great at club level, Luca De La Torre was fine, and Brendan Aaronson had a goal and an assist, but mostly in a bench role, which seemed odd given his experience relative to the roster.
Fullback was an adventure, with Alex Freeman getting an extended look at right back to mixed results, and his counterpart Max Arfsten having so many great attacking moments offset but horrific 1v1 defending. John Tolken for me was more steady on the left but maybe that’s not what Pochettino wants off the bench next summer. The depth behind Antonee Robinson and Sergino Dest remains up in the air.
THE UGLY
Now it’s time to take Mauricio Pochettino to task.
Coach, you haven’t been here the last few years, so let me fill you in on what you are up against.
This is a national team that missed a World Cup not that long ago, has fired two coaches it gave extensions to for an additional cycle that backfired both times in the last decade, and is asking you to do the impossible and clean up the mess.
On top of that, your bosses have been gouging fans with ticket prices for years and actively believe that higher prices and fewer fans is better because money. This is not a new criticism, your captain brought this up a few years back during a friendly in Cincinnati and you Coach Poch are learning that America has a lot of people who happen to be of dual nationality and enjoy soccer. This is a feature, not a bug, of this country.
Pochettino was right to praise Guatemala and their fans for a great performance for a side that just matched their best ever finish in the modern Gold Cup era. Coach is however incredibly wrong to point the finger at U.S. fans for not wanting to shell out top dollar to watch a largely second and third string roster play soccer for a dysfunctional national team.
The question Poch should answer is would you spend over $100 per ticket to watch Spurs or Chelsea’s third string play the 83rd place team (a midtable Leauge Two side) in the English pyramid? Again, that game shouldn’t have been played in Jerry World, I don’t get it, but that wasn’t my decision.
Now, none of this is specifically your fault coach, but your job is to win games. I don’t care how you do it, I don’t care if you keep Pulisic and McKennie home for the next year at this point. As far as I am concerned after the World Cup the federation should thank you for your services and move on. Hopefully, they’re ready with a candidate for the full cycle this time to make up for the hatchet job they’ve done for the second time in three cycles.
What this boils down to is the USMNT is let’s say the 16th best team in the world. I know the actual ranking went up this month, but for the hypothetical, you are the actual #16 seed in the knockout stages. Next summer at home, you are going to be the higher seed in the Round of 32 and should be able to win that game.
After that you are going to play a team that is better than you, and you are attempting to beat a team better than you with the same style of play that said team that is better than is using. We saw that experiment in 2022, it didn’t go well, and Louis F Van Gaal rightly burned Gregg on the way out the door postgame.
And right now, this team might as well still have the elder Berhalter at the helm, cause I don’t see much difference in the tactics and play. The build up is slow and lacks creativity. You let Haiti stay in a game they had no business being in cause your keeper making his fourth international start is being told not to hoof stuff upfield under pressure.
I don’t care what Matt Freese or Matt Turner can do with their feet; I only care that they keep the ball out of the net. Your predecessor died on this hill because he didn’t learn we’re not the 15th-best team in the world. We’re 16th, and we can’t beat everyone above us at their own game. We need to play ours.
Counter attacks, speed, and physicality in the midfield. These were the tenets of the USMNT a decade ago, and they have been lost in this aimless quest to play total soccer, or jogo bonito, or tiki taka that the rest of the world uses. Go watch the USA end Spain’s 35-game unbeaten streak or whatever it was in 2009 at the Confederations Cup and see if we did that with building from the back.
We aren’t the rest of the world, this is not PSG in the Champions League. National team coaching is so much different from club coaching; it is 100 percent about the strengths of the players you have and not trying to make them into something they are not.
After the 2022 World Cup, we thought this team had a chance to develop and grow, and maybe have an outside chance to make a semifinal at the World Cup, something that only three teams have done outside of Europe and South America. The USA (1930), South Korea (2002 as joint hosts), and Morocco (2022) are the list, and it would have been cool to have been the first team to do it twice.
Now I don’t have the confidence that this team will absolutely make it out of the group. That’s not entirely on the national team coach; not all of the star players we have did themselves a lot of favors on the field this cycle with their club situations. But this team is rightly far closer to potentially joining South Africa (2010) and Qatar (2022) as hosts that got grouped then they are to getting to the quarterfinals.
Clearly not helping the situation is my head coach infighting with his own captain and fanbase after barely a year on the job.
Also that coach has only one year to fix the mess he didn’t make, but isn’t currently helping clean up either. With just a few friendly windows to do it in and the backing of a federation that cares more about hosting major tournaments this summer and making money the last decade than on-field results, it’s going to take a lot to gain confidence in this team again.
Great editorial, you really spoke to many of the thoughts I’ve been having about this program. Particularly on point about Poch wagging his finger at US fans rather than seeing what he can do to inspire them, as well as what can be done to improve the federation’s thinking.