Who Replaces Poch? A Ranking of the USMNT’s Next Potential Coaches

One thing that should never have surprised anybody about Mauricio Pochettino potentially leaving the USMNT for Manchester United is that this was always a possibility. It was, in fact, the possibility. When you go fishing in the deep end of the coaching pool, when you convince a manager with Champions League ambitions, unfinished business in the Premier League and a resume full of heavyweight club jobs to take over a national team, you don't get to pretend you're shocked when one of those clubs comes calling.

Man U did. (Amusingly, by this time next year, they might be neither a Premier League team nor a Champions League team. Once the ink is dry, Poch has got his work cut out.)

US Soccer knew all of this. Everybody knew this. Poch was never some lifer who'd spent his career dreaming of managing the United States. He was a big-game hunt, a splashy hire funded by a billionaire superfan, designed to change the perception of the program as much as its performance on the field. And part of the price of that ambition was accepting that the USMNT job was a pit stop.

That's not an indictment of the decision to hire him, nor to retain him – both were, I think, the right calls. It wasn't perfect under Poch, but it was good. And if we lose our next coach to a Manchester United-sized club, it will mean that he did a good job, too.

I'd sign up for that.

So was the Mauricio Pochettino era a success for the USMNT? Depends on which lens you want to look through. I've got two of them, one for each eye:

Lens 1: Pochettino's USMNT did worse at the World Cup than Gregg Berhalter's.

• Berhalter got the youngest team in Qatar to the round of 16 unbeaten, and then lost a hard-fought, 3-1 battle to a really good Dutch team. The US had their chances* to tie it 2-2 in the second half before wilting in the last 10 minutes.
  • (*) I went back and watched every game of the past two World Cups in late September, and the biggest differentiating factor – as in, "single-handedly accounts for 85% of the attacking difference between the two teams" – was Folarin Balogun. The US played really, really good ball in 2022. They just didn't have high-level match-winners.
• Poch got a more experienced team, in a home World Cup, to the round of 16 with one loss, then got absolutely smoked by a washed Belgium side. It was a disaster that every single soccer fan – current or potential future – in the country watched. It was a humiliation.

That was not what he was hired for. This was the game he was hired to win, but we didn't even show up. What was the point of bringing him back?