Culture
Who is Pochettino? Is this a coup for the USMNT? Will it help them at World Cup?
The U.S. men’s national soccer team received a huge boost on Thursday morning when Mauricio Pochettino agreed to become their next head coach.
The Athletic revealed that Pochettino, who had been a top target for the opening, had come to a deal with U.S. Soccer, the sport’s governing body. Pochettino has never managed at international level, but he is a very well-respected name in the club game.
This is a big-name arrival ahead of a men’s World Cup that the U.S. will co-host with neighbours Canada and Mexico in 2026, staging the bulk of the games including all matches from the quarter-finals onwards. But just who is Pochettino? How much of a coup is this? What is his style of play?
Here, The Athletic’s Jack Pitt-Brooke answers everything you need to know about the 52-year-old Argentinian.
So, who exactly is Mauricio Pochettino?
Mauricio Pochettino is considered one of the best managers in European football.
As a player, he was a very competitive centre-back, leaving his native Argentina at age 22 to play for Barcelona-based Espanyol in Spain, before brief spells in France with Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and Bordeaux, then returning to Espanyol to finish his playing career. He played for Argentina at the 2002 World Cup, and won 20 caps overall.
Pochettino, left, playing for Espanyol (Luis Bagu/Getty Images)
Pochettino also started his coaching career at Espanyol, in 2009, earning a reputation for playing brave high-pressing football with young players, turning the fortunes of the team around and saving them from relegation to Spain’s second division. His next job was at Southampton in England’s Premier League in 2013, where he took the team to new heights with his energetic style of play. Then he stepped up to Tottenham Hotspur the following year, where he oversaw their greatest sustained run of the modern era, finishing third, second and third in the Premier League in successive seasons, as well as getting to the final of the 2018-19 Champions League.
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Since then, Pochettino has managed PSG, winning a French Cup and a Ligue 1 title, and then spent last season as Chelsea head coach, where he guided them to sixth place in the Premier League, enough to qualify for European football in the coming campaign, and into the Carabao Cup final.
How much of a coup is this for the USMNT?
It is huge to land one of the best coaches from the club game to manage the men’s national team.
The closest comparison might be Jurgen Klinsmann, the former Germany striker who coached the USMNT from 2011 to 2016, but Pochettino comes to the job with far more of a track record in European club football management than he did. Klinsmann had only had one disappointing season at Bayern Munich (2008-09) before he got the United States job, as well as taking hosts Germany to the semi-finals of the 2006 World Cup.
Pochettino, by contrast, has been one of the most impressive coaches in the European club game for the past 15 years.
What he did at Tottenham remains one of the best-sustained spells of management in recent years, even if it did not end up with them winning any trophies.
Why would Pochettino take an international job?
Pochettino has always been a romantic with a love for the game’s history.
He knows the World Cup is the pinnacle of the game. He remembers as a boy watching Argentina win the 1978 (as hosts) and 1986 World Cups, the latter of which made Diego Maradona his hero for life. He is hugely proud of playing in the 2002 World Cup, even if he is remembered by some for giving away the deciding penalty in a 1-0 group-stage loss against England — he still has a photo of that dubious ‘foul’ he committed on Michael Owen, signed by the England striker, up on a wall at home.
Pochettino ‘fouling’ Owen at the 2002 World Cup (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
He told me in an interview in 2022 how much the World Cup means to him. “You don’t think about anything, you don’t think about money, you think only to deliver your best, and to make the people happy,” Pochettino said. “Because you know very well your country is behind you. The feeling is completely different from other competitions. That is why the players feel so different.”
Pochettino told me he would “of course” want to manage in a World Cup one day, and not necessarily with Argentina, saying: “You never know what happens. I am open to everything.”
What about club football?
Since being sacked by Tottenham in November 2019 after they began that season poorly, Pochettino has worked for two of the highest profile and wealthiest clubs in Europe, PSG and Chelsea.
In Paris, he got to manage Neymar, Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappe, one of the highest-quality front lines ever assembled at club level. Ultimately, he performed in line with most PSG coaches, both before and after him, and was released at the end of the 2021-22 season.
He was brought in at Chelsea last summer to impose a new style of football onto their oversized squad and after a tough start, he got there in the end, setting them up for a great finish to the season (they won their final five matches, scoring 14 goals) and winning over fans who had doubted him at the beginning because of his connections to London rivals Tottenham. In the end, he left Chelsea in June with his reputation improved.
But both of these were difficult experiences at points, with plenty of internal politics to manage. European club football is in a strange place right now, with not many clubs offering their managers/head coaches the chance to build something.
That would be part of the attraction of taking a very different challenge with the USMNT.
What kind of football does he play?
Throughout his managerial career, Pochettino has tried to get his teams playing a brave, aggressive, high-pressing style.
It is a positional game, focused on maintaining a good structure in and out of possession, so the players are in the right places to win the ball back quickly — ideally within three seconds — whenever his team lose it. He wants his sides to dominate the ball and defend high up the pitch.
Pochettino’s Tottenham mastered this style of football, taking the north London club to new heights.
At their best, a Pochettino team are physically relentless, powerful and dominant, not giving the opposition any room to breathe. With PSG, it was not always possible to play exactly like this because of the big-name personnel up front who did not always want to press from the front. But in the second half of last season, Chelsea started to look like a Pochettino team, and the wins followed.
Are those methods suited to international football?
Fitness work is hugely important to Pochettino and his coaching staff but the nature of the international game is that coaches do not get to work with their players for that long. It is harder for them to improve their players as individuals, something that Pochettino has always been big on, during those short periods together before they return to their clubs.
Pochettino with his players at PSG (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
One thing that has always been important to him has been bringing through young players, right from the time he was starting at Espanyol and then Southampton.
When he was discussed not so long ago as a potential England manager, the point was made how many of their current squad owe their career to their development under Pochettino: Luke Shaw (Southampton), Harry Kane, Kyle Walker, Kieran Trippier (Tottenham), Conor Gallagher and Cole Palmer (Chelsea). He will hope to develop a similar generation of youngsters now he has the USMNT job.
How will he deal with the scrutiny that comes with this role?
Pochettino is used to the media spotlight, especially after those spells at PSG and Chelsea. But international football is different. There will be less day-to-day attention than his days at those clubs, certainly, but there will be times when Pochettino has the eyes of hundreds of millions of Americans on him. The U.S. public are unlikely to be forgiving if they feel the team are not heading in the right direction as that 2026 World Cup looms larger.
But that is also part of the attraction, given what a huge event it will be in two years’ time. Coaching that team in their home World Cup, in front of 70,000 people for their opening group-stage match at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on June 12, 2026 will be the equivalent of standing in front of the eyes of the whole world.
Does it matter he’s not an American?
The team had non-American coaches before, and not just Klinsmann. There was Bora Milutinovic, from Serbia, in the early 1990s, the last time the U.S. staged the World Cup. Men from Poland, Greece, the UK and more have also had the job. There is no reason that nationality should be a barrier to Pochettino in the role. He has worked for three different Premier League clubs and while he initially had an interpreter at Southampton, his English is now certainly good enough to work in the States.
The most important thing will be to demonstrate a commitment to U.S. soccer, and a deep knowledge of all the players at his disposal, whether they play in MLS, Europe or elsewhere. This will mean lots of hard work, and air miles, getting to know them all.
How much does this improve USMNT’s chances at the 2026 World Cup?
It is hard to know how proven club managers will fare in the international game. They are effectively two different formats of the same sport.
Antonio Conte, a serial title winner at club level, improved Italy but could only get them to the quarter-finals of Euro 2016. Luis Enrique had a great European Championship with Spain in 2021, reaching the semis, but they were knocked out of the following year’s World Cup in the round of 16 by Morocco. Hansi Flick won the treble with Bayern in 2020 but could not even get Germany out of the group in Qatar.
Making predictions about international tournaments is almost impossible, given how fine the margins are between success and failure at that level. But we can say Pochettino will bring fresh ideas, energy and proven methods to the U.S. job, as well as a sense of confidence and optimism the whole country can feed on.
(Top photo: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
Mr. Mudimbe was unapologetic. “To the question ‘what is Africa?’ or ‘how to define African cultures?’ one today cannot but refer to a body of knowledge in which Africa has been subsumed by Western disciplines such as anthropology, history, theology or whatever other scientific discourse,” he told Callaloo. “And this is the level on which to situate my project.”
Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born on Dec. 8, 1941, in Likasi, in the Katanga Province of what was then the Belgian Congo, to Gustave Tshiluila, a civil servant, and Victorine Ngalula. At a young age, he said in 1991, he “began living with Benedictine monks as a seminarist” in Kakanda, in pre-independence Congo. He had “no contact with the external world, even with my family, and indeed had no vacations.”
When he was 17 or 18, he recalled, he decided to become a monk, this time among the Benedictine “White Fathers” of Gihindamuyaga, in Rwanda. But in his early 20s, already “completely francophonized,” he abandoned the religious life and entered Lovanium University in Kinshasa, graduating in 1966 with a degree in Romance philology. In 1970 he received a doctorate in philosophy and literature from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. He then returned to Congo to teach.
In the 1970s Mr. Mudimbe published, among other writings, three novels, all translated into English: “Entre les Eaux” (1973), published in English as “Between the Waters”; “Le Bel Immonde” (“Before the Birth of the Moon,” 1976); and “L’Écart” (“The Rift,” 1979). The principal characters in these novels “find it impossible to tie themselves to anything solid,” the scholar Nadia Yala Kisukidi commented in Le Monde.
At the end of the 1970s, when the offer came from Mr. Mobutu to be “in charge of, I guess, ideology and things like that,” as Mr. Mudimbe put it to Callaloo, he reflected that “I didn’t think of myself and I still don’t think of myself as a politician.” After he established himself in the United States, his focus turned to essays and philosophy; among other books, he wrote “L’Odeur du Père” (1982), “Parables and Fables” (1991) and “Tales of Faith” (1997).
Someone once defined poetry as “memorable speech.” By that standard, each of us has committed at least some poetry to memory. Nursery rhymes, song lyrics and movie catchphrases all find their way into our heads, often without any effort on our part.
More formal memorization used to be a common classroom ritual. Schoolchildren would stand and recite approved works for their teachers and peers. That kind of learning has mostly gone out of fashion, which may be a sign of progress or a symptom of decline. Either way, school shouldn’t be the only place for poetry.
And learning a poem by heart doesn’t have to be drudgery. It can be a way of holding onto something beautiful, a morsel of verbal pleasure you can take out whenever you want. A poem recited under your breath or in your head can soothe your nerves, drive away the noise of everyday life or grant a moment of simple happiness.
At a time when we are flooded with texts, rants and A.I. slop, a poem occupies a quieter, less commodified corner of your consciousness. It’s a flower in the windowbox of your mind.
There are millions of them available, in every imaginable style, touching on every facet of experience. You could store a whole anthology in your brain.
But let’s start with one: “Recuerdo,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
“Recuerdo,” first published in 1919 in Poetry magazine, is the recollection of a night out on the town — or more precisely on the water, presumably the stretch of New York Harbor served by the Staten Island Ferry. We asked some friends of the Book Review — poets, novelists, playwrights, actors and other literature lovers — to recite it for us, and a bunch said yes.
Today, Ada Limón, Ina Garten and Ethan Hawke will introduce you to the poem. Here’s the first of the three stanzas.
Recuerdo
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
We lay on a hill–top underneath the moon;
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate
Why did we pick “Recuerdo”? We combed through our shelves like Goldilocks, looking for a poem that was just right: not too difficult, but not too simple; not obscure but not a chestnut; not a downer but not frivolous either. We didn’t want a poem that was too long, and we thought something that rhymed would be more fun — and easier — to memorize than a cascade of free verse.
Millay, who was born in Maine in 1892 and was a fixture of the Greenwich Village bohemian scene in the 1920s, caught our eye for a few reasons. In her lifetime, she was a very famous poet.
She was a decidedly modern author who often wrote in traditional forms, and who has stayed popular through 100 years of fluctuating fashion. Her verse, while serious and sophisticated, carries its literary baggage lightly.
When you get to the second stanza of “Recuerdo,” read here by Ina Garten, you realize that it has a hook.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
Ina Garten, cook and author
It’s a city poem, but one that incorporates some arresting nature imagery (the sun, the moon, the wan glow of dawn). It delivers a confidential message — addressed to a “you” who shares the memory of those moments by the fire and in the moonlight — while striking a convivial, sociable tone.
The poem concludes with an impulsive act of generosity that carries a hint of melancholy. Here’s Ethan Hawke, reading the third and final stanza.
We were very tired, we were very merry,
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
We hailed, “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl–covered head,
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears,
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Ethan Hawke, actor
That’s it. The night is over; another day is here with its obligations and routines; we’re about to trade the open air of the ferry for the crowded underground platforms of the subway.
This poem stands up to repeated readings. It stays in your mind and your ear. It’s a fun poem about having fun, though of course there’s more to it than that. The poem expresses the desire to hold on to a fleeting experience, to fix it in words and images before it’s washed away on the tide of time.
“Recuerdo,” in Spanish, can mean recollection or souvenir, which is kind of perfect. The speaker summons bits and pieces of a memorable night, organizing them into verses that bring those hours back to life, even though they’re gone forever. We pick up those verses, and — impossibly but also unmistakably — we’re right there with her, inhaling the sea-kissed morning air.
So here is the challenge: Memorize this poem! Why? Because it’s unforgettable.
Below, you’ll find a game designed to help you learn “Recuerdo.” Today your goal is to master that wonderful refrain. (Once you’ve done that, you’ll have one third of the poem.) As the Challenge continues through the week, we’ll look closely at how the poem is made, at what it’s about and at the extraordinary woman who wrote it. There will be new games and videos every day, until we disembark on Friday, poem in hand. Bon voyage!
Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Question 1/3
Let’s start with the refrain. Fill in the rhyming words.
We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank. Need help? Click “See Full Poem
& Readings” at the top of the page.
Monday
Learn a poem with us this week. Keep it for a lifetime.
Tuesday (Available tomorrow)
How rhythm and rhyme make a poem memorable.
Wednesday (Available Apr. 30)
This is a New York poem. After you learn it, you can take it anywhere.
Thursday (Available May 1)
This poem is about staying up all night. Use it to greet the day.
Friday (Available May 2)
We’ve learned a poem this week. Now it’s yours.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio and Joumana Khatib. Additional editing by
Emily Eakin, Tina Jordan, Laura Thompson and Emma Lumeij. Design and development by Umi Syam and
Eden Weingart. Additional design by Victoria Pandeirada. Video production by Caroline Kim.
Additional video production by McKinnon de Kuyper. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg. Illustration
art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Hannah Robinson.
Audio of “Recuerdo” from “Edna St. Vincent Millay in Readings From Her Poems” (1941, RCA); accompanying
photograph from Associated Press.
Blundstone Boots
There was a point when I wore kitchen clogs, which I found uncomfortable. Then, Birkenstocks, but your heel’s exposed. Your sock’s going to get soaked, especially when you’re flooding the floors to clean at the end of the night. Blundstones are waterproof and they look good. I can go from the airplane to out in the wild, right into the kitchen and I feel like they fit all those scenarios.
Palo Santo
When I opened my restaurant in the Line hotel in Austin, it was in every single room. My wife had to tell me what it was because I was like, “What are these wooden sticks in here for?” I travel with it and when I’m in dressing rooms, studios and hotels, it just makes everything smell familiar to me, regardless of where I am.
Dental Hygiene
When I’m eating different flavors throughout the day — snacking on things or trying 15 dishes on “Top Chef” — at a certain point, my mouth starts to just feel gross. Brushing my teeth, tongue scraping and flossing help me reset a little bit.
Deep Pockets
A lot of women’s pants have little pockets that go down maybe three inches. I need them to touch my thigh. Because I’m not a purse kind of person, I like to fit my wallet, keys and mints all in my pocket if I can. I have a stylist for any clothes that I wear in public or on television. When fending for myself, I’m going to wear pants that are two times too big, comfortable and with deep pockets. Lululemon dance studio relaxed fit mid-rise cargo pants are so comfortable. Not only do they have deep pockets, they also have cargo and back pockets.
Carmex
My preference is the stick. I always carry it in my left pocket; that’s just where it lives. I don’t leave home without it and it’s stashed in random places in our house — on my desk, in the junk drawer downstairs, two in our bedroom. I buy them in bulk and take great pride in finishing them.
Peppermint Gum
My mom used to tell me, “You look like I look like a cow chewing gum.” But it keeps cadence and there’s something in the rhythm of chewing where if I’m doing a task, especially if I’m cooking for hours, it’s a place for the anxiety to go. You know, how people relax with knee bouncing.
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