Mauricio Pochettino Leaves The USMNT For An Even Bigger Mess

After an extended denouement to a doomed tenure, Manchester United finally set manager Michael Carrick loose on Thursday, hoping to put an end to the club’s worst league start in 40 years. On Friday, the next era for England’s most famous club began, sort of, as United announced that Mauricio Pochettino would be leaving the U.S. men’s national team on Nov. 18 in order to become the new boss at Old Trafford.

Carrick’s departure is no surprise, but Pochettino’s arrival counts as a bit of a shock. Pochettino had famously come to international prominence first at Southampton and then in his five-season-plus stint at Tottenham Hotspur, which saw that club’s evolution from an also-ran into, well, an also-ran that could actually fight with the big boys. Eventually, his tenure there grew stale and the lack of trophies forced a move, with Tottenham firing him in November of 2019. The Argentine then took a year off before signing on to succeed Thomas Tuchel at Paris Saint-Germain in early 2021; his first half-season there wasn’t great, as he oversaw the only PSG squad to not win the Ligue 1 title this decade. He did go on to win the league in his first full season, but PSG let him go in the summer of 2022 anyway. A return to the Premier League with Chelsea followed in 2023, where he finished in sixth place in his only season at Stamford Bridge.

That brings us to September 2024, when Pochettino became manager of the USMNT ahead of the 2026 World Cup cycle. His appointment was a big deal, as he became the highest-paid and most accomplished manager in the country’s history (Jurgen Klinsmann will quibble with the latter assessment, but whatever) in advance of a home(-ish) World Cup. Pochettino had a rocky start there, but eventually righted the ship enough to guide the USMNT to a Group D first-place finish and a Round of 32 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina. An embarrassing loss to Belgium in the Round of 16 put a bit of a damper on the run, but overall, Pochettino did what he was hired to do: help the USMNT perform at the World Cup.

Now, in the middle of an international break where he will manage two matches in the CONCACAF Nations League (both against Haiti, on Nov. 14 and 17), Pochettino has agreed to take on an even harder challenge: Fix what has been ailing Manchester United since Sir Alex Ferguson called it quits 13-plus years ago. It’s a quintessential decision from United, in that Pochettino is one of the bigger names that could have been available to replace Carrick, and also in that his tactics appear to be a bad fit for the current squad. Pochettino’s style of play has always been high-intensity and demanded loads of running; United is currently 19th in distance covered per match this season, ahead of only Liverpool. Bringing in a manager mid-season who will want his new charges to run, without a preseason of intensity training, is a recipe for disaster, which means it’s par for the course at United. (Remember when the club hired Ruben Amorim to run a three-defender formation without any suitable players for it?)

United is a badly constructed team—I guess a club of its stature wouldn’t be in 18th place if not for some roster mishaps—and as recently as last month had a veteran player calling out the club’s inept roster-building following a dreadful week. Even in the last 10 days, which saw United win against Roma in the Champions League and draw Aston Villa domestically, the club had to come back three times from two goals down to achieve a result: a 17-minute 2-0 deficit to Roma turned into a 3-2 win, and United twice trailed Villa by two before equalizing with two stoppage-time goals.

It will be up to Pochettino to figure out a way to keep United in the first division. I can’t believe that relegation is a real worry for United, but the table says what it says. There’s a chance that getting a new manager bump will help United claw back up the table into a respectable finish, but there is an almost-as-likely chance that something has broken at Old Trafford, and even Pochettino can’t fix it in time. The difference between his style and what the players have put on display this season will take some time to resolve, and United doesn’t have much of that left if it still wants to finish in the top half. Pochettino will have to hit the ground running as soon as he gets to England, and he will have to face Liverpool just four days after officially taking charge. Good luck with that.

As for the USMNT, the timing could have been much worse. Sure, Pochettino announcing his departure mid-international break isn’t ideal, but it’s a fresh four-year cycle, which should allow U.S. Soccer plenty of time to find a manager that will hopefully accomplish two things: Stay the entire cycle and perhaps beyond, and guide the USMNT into a new era where it could beat the Belgiums of the world. The obvious name, which has already been reported as a possibility, is Pep Guardiola. The Spaniard has won everything, repeatedly, at club level and might have his sights on an international appointment. Guardiola is a pipe dream, but it’s the kind of dream that the U.S. should be pursuing. The federation should write him a blank check and see if that entices him to move back stateside; Guardiola famously lived in New York City in between jobs last decade.

Who knows if he would be good at managing a national team, though. Guardiola is famously an intense manager who demands precision and buy-in, two things that are much harder to accomplish with the fragmented national team schedules. He’s also a genius, though, so it’s probable that he would figure it out, and his appointment would be the next step in the path towards the USMNT becoming a real force in international soccer both on and off the field.

Of course, if Guardiola turns the USMNT down in hopes of landing jobs of higher caliber—England? Brazil? Spain?—then the options become a lot scarier. As in, Roberto Martínez is also being reported as a possible Pochettino replacement, having been relieved of his duties with Portugal after the World Cup. Martínez is the epitome of failing upward, having gotten little out of Belgium’s golden generation last decade and then refusing to accept the fact that Cristiano Ronaldo was turbo-washed at the World Cup this summer. Hiring Martínez would be a white flag for the USMNT, an acknowledgement that there is no exciting name who would want to take the job. This makes me think that Martínez is the most likely choice, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

That is a problem for a later day, and for a different organization, because for now, the only certainty is that Mauricio Pochettino will return to the Premier League for a fourth gig. If managing Chelsea was so difficult that he didn’t last more than a year, then I hope Pochettino understands United will be harder. The expectations are similarly sky high, but, with no respect to Chelsea, United is a much bigger club, and Pochettino will have to drown out a chorus—Rio Ferdinand chief among them—that will look to scrutinize and criticize his every move. The payoff, if it works, is much higher, and that’s probably what has called to so many managers since Ferguson’s retirement. If Pochettino is the manager to fix Manchester United, his name will live on in the Premier League history books. If not, well, he’ll just go down as another fool who thought he was the answer to the question that has weighed down England’s biggest club for 13 years.