Mauricio Pochettino said that it is “neither an advantage nor a disadvantage” that the United States’ World Cup group consists of two – and perhaps three – teams that his team will have played in friendlies within a year or so before kickoff of their opening game.
The US were drawn with Australia, Paraguay and the winner of a European play-off involving Turkey, Romania, Kosovo and Slovakia. The US played Australia in a friendly in October, winning 2-1 in Commerce City, Colorado. They played Paraguay in another friendly in November – a game that marked Gio Reyna’s return to form with the national team in a 2-1 win. Turkey, should they make it through the play-off, would have a leg up on preparations, having beaten the US 2-1 in a pre-Gold Cup friendly in June 2025.
A lot can happen in a year. And Pochettino, like his counterpart Tony Popovic for Australia, emphasized that the circumstances surrounding friendly matches are entirely different from the World Cup, where the world will be watching and the stakes could hardly be higher.
“The reality is that the circumstances will change,” he told reporters. “That is why they are going to be completely different games, maybe with different rosters or different players.”
Pochettino had plenty of praise for the star-studded, at times bizarre event, which unfolded with the pomp, circumstance and sizable runtime typical of just about any draw event for an international soccer competition. Now that the matchups are determined, Pochettino said his primary focus with the players will be to convey the weight of expectation, and the urgency with which he expects his charges to act now that the path before them has, at long last, been laid out.
Reminiscing about his sole World Cup experience as a player with Argentina in 2002, Pochettino said that after he came home from the South Korea-Japan tournament he slipped into a “massive depression”, having achieved a childhood dream and now seemingly having little to look forward to for the remainder of his career (which, at the game of 31, was coming to its tail end).
“Your biggest dream disappears, and then you feel like there’s not going to be another possibility to be involved in this,” Pochettino said. “That’s the biggest energy i want to transmit to the players. This is the most unbelievable event, and the most unbelievable feeling you can have. We can work on fitness, we can work on tactics, but we need to feel. Put everything in. It’s today. We are going to have a country behind us.”
To that end, Pochettino said that for as intense as he expects the preparations for the group stage to be, he and his staff are not looking too far ahead – discussing potential second-round matchups (which could include a rematch of the 2014 knockout round with Belgium, among several other intriguing possibilities) in the car between the Kennedy Center and the site of his press conference is about as far as it’s gone so far.
“If you are Argentina, the best team in the world, maybe you can look at what’s after,” Pochettino said. “With the USA, the first game is the final of the World Cup. The second game needs to be the final of the World Cup too.”
