What A Poch Believes

USMNT roster time is a truly special time in the world of American soccer. Nothing brings out the angst and self-loathing quite like the naming of fewer than two dozen players to represent our aspiring soccer nation, regardless of the stakes.

It's probably more indicative of our psychosis than anything else that we freak out when the stakes are about as low as they can get. September's two friendlies, against South Korea on September 6 in New Jersey and Japan on September 9 in Columbus, aren't much more than a pair of practice games on the road to the World Cup in 2026.

Sure, the World Cup is less than a year away and there aren't that many games left for USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino to work out who should be in his team for a home tournament, but a lot can happen between now and next June. Logically speaking, it would be somewhat silly to presume you can approximate an XI now that will take the field in the first World Cup game in 2026.

But I'm not here to debate the wisdom of Pochettino's choices for this round of friendlies. By now you've likely consumed thousands and thousands of words, both written and spoken, on why Poch is wrong about Player X and should be calling up Player Y instead.

Yawn. Mostly.

Of course, a lot of the railing about the roster stems from the number of MLS players on the list (12) and the comments Pochettino made about America's top outdoor men's soccer league in his chat with the media on Tuesday.

Here are those comments, for reference (in video form because how they were delivered is important and because I think a lot gets lost trying to transcribe this particular non-native English-speaking coach):

Well. Isn't that interesting. Pochettino going to bat for MLS! Remember, this is an ex-player who spent years playing in Spain and then managed in the Premier League and at Paris Saint-Germain. It stands to reason that he knows a thing or two about how league quality informs player quality and what that might mean for a national team setup. The United States isn't deep enough with regulars getting minutes in Europe's top competitions to avoid picking guys from MLS, but that doesn't mean Pochettino has to say what he said.

Which leaves us this question: Did he mean it, or was he doing the bidding of his paymasters?

I hesitate to engage with the latter argument because it smacks of feeding the trolls, but there are enough USMNT fans on the fringes yelling about that it's very difficult to stay away from. Like most conspiracy theories, this one is nearly indestructible; it morphs as needed to fit the current situation, regardless of how tortured the new logic.

When Gregg Berhalter led the USMNT, the "MLS quota" flowed from Gregg's connections to the league. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Now that a famous foreign manager who never played nor coached in MLS is on the job and picking players out of the league for the national team, the explanation that fits the conspiracy is less direct.

Pochettino is picking players he doesn't actually like because his bosses asked him to? Or maybe he's picking players he doesn't actually like because he's currying favor, absent a direct order? Or Garber gave him a quota (and it makes sense he would follow it)? Or nepotism?*

Did I miss a report that Ken Griffin is a big MLS sicko? Billionaires do control the world, after all.

None of that passes the smell test. We're in Occam's razor territory. Mauricio Pochettino said what he said because he believes it.

I'm not really interested in drilling down on what he meant by "competitive", though I think that's fairly easy to understand. See Doyle, Matthew if you want more on that.

I am interested in Pochettino's neutral approach to the USMNT player pool re: club/league affiliation. This does not appear to be a man who took on the job of leading the Americans into a home World Cup with any preconceived notions about the quality of Major League Soccer or the abilities of its players to help the team. We're hitting September the year before the tournament and he's still digging into new names regardless of where those names play.

I know there's a lot of angst over this development, even among those who aren't knee-deep in the QSMNT theories. Plenty of smart soccer people think MLS isn't very good and are aghast that our well-heeled $6.5 million-a-year head coach thinks otherwise.

I'm not here to convince you that MLS is good, actually, or argue that Pochettino is horrifically wrong in his opinions. I might lean in the latter direction, at least when it comes to this particular roster, but I'm happy to leave that to others.

I'm more of a mind to sit back and wonder. Here we have a coach who is so earnest in his attempt to honestly (at least in his mind) analyze the totality of the USMNT player pool that he's now sitting on the extreme end of the "Are MLS players good enough for the USMNT?" spectrum.

Remember that we're only a few head coaches and World Cup cycles removed from the last (permanent) foreign USMNT boss saying this...

"Our players who go outside the U.S. in England, Germany, Spain or France get used to the pressure and used to getting criticized if they have a bad game," Klinsmann told Reuters in an interview near his adopted home in Southern California."They hear about it from the local people in the supermarket or at the shops or in the streets. The pressure is everywhere. They're used to having to justify themselves for their performance all the time. Shifting that into the United States would be a huge step and is high on our wish list for the future."

...which caused quite a stir at the time, mostly because the man paid to sell Major League Soccer, Don Garber, hackled up and fired back.

Trying to place Pochettino in time and space—as both an Argentine and Euro-influenced fútbol man—is proving more difficult that I think most of us thought. Pochettino is defying some our preconceived notions by bringing none to the table himself.

Is it because he's Argentine that he's agnostic about MLS's role as a home of national team-quality players? Did he take the USMNT job with zero understanding of the player pool and is still catching up—meaning he'll realize MLS isn't good enough (per some opinions) eventually? Is he (and by extension, the staff he brought with him) really bad at player evaluation?

All of these can be possible.

If you're of the opinion that a player that just made a €30 million move to a Champions League side in one of the best leagues in the world is a better national team option for a camp less than one year from a World Cup than a 25-year-old midfielder who mostly plays centerback from a decent MLS team, that's not an endearing trait. It's a terrifying one.

Really fascinated by Pochettino's approach to the national team. This is clearly a guy who took the job with zero to few preconceived notions about American soccer and is acting accordingly. He might also be incredibly naive and unable to properly judge player quality. It's weird!

— Jason Davis (@davisjason.bsky.social) August 26, 2025 at 2:46 PM

*I don't know either, but people are using that word. There is a Berhalter AND a Klinsmann on the team...

How bout some plugs?

Morning Kickaround is a thing and it's good and we've got a MASSIVE announcement coming in the next few days.

The Best Soccer Show tackled the USMNT roster this week.

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