US Soccer hires Pochettino as national coach

The home team for the 2026 World Cup will hire a coach from abroad.

According to several media outlets, the US soccer team has managed to sign Mauricio Pochettino, an Argentine who is successful at the highest level of European club soccer, to lead the US men’s national team to the next World Cup, which will be held in the US, Mexico and Canada.

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US Soccer did not respond to a request for comment.

Pochettino was one of the biggest names in the coaching market this summer after leaving the Chelsea job by mutual consent of the club. He was praised for Chelsea’s turnaround in the second half of the 2023-24 English Premier League season, which saw the Blues finish sixth and give fans hope after a disappointing two years since the club was purchased by a consortium led by Clearlake Capital and Todd Boehly in 2022.

The new coach steps into a similarly bleak situation, as the U.S. men were eliminated in the first round of this summer’s Copa America on home soil. The poor performance by a talented group of U.S. players led to the firing of Gregg Berhalter, who coached the team to the knockout stages of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.

The 52-year-old Pochettino played for the Argentina national team at the 2002 World Cup. Before Chelsea, he was a Premier League coach at Southampton, where he led the club to its best-ever performance in 2014, and at Tottenham Hotspur from 2014 to 2019, where he guided Spurs to runners-up finishes in both the EPL and UEFA Champions League. He later won the French Ligue 1 with Paris Saint-Germain.

Despite his resume, Pochettino was reportedly not a top target for US Soccer. The US was interested in Jurgen Klopp, who stepped down as Liverpool manager after nine hugely successful seasons with the EPL powerhouse. But Klopp left Liverpool saying he didn’t want to coach anywhere else, and so far he’s kept his word.

Berhalter earned $2.3 million in the 2022 calendar year, according to U.S. Soccer tax filings. It’s likely Pochettino is paid significantly more.

This is not the first time that an international coach has led the men’s national team. Germany’s Jurgen Klinsmann was in charge from 2011 to 2016, and Serbia’s Bora Milutinovic led the team the last time the World Cup was played in the US in 1994.

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