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Doug McIntyre Soccer Journalist
LOS ANGELES STADIUM — All it took was one unlucky loss in the USA’s dead-rubber final group-stage game of the 2026 FIFA World Cup for Mauricio Pochettino to reveal the immense pressure he knows he’s under.
Hired to be the men’s national team's savior when the U.S. Soccer Federation backed up the Brinks truck — with the help of some deep-pocketed angel investors — to lure one of the world’s most highly regarded coaches to what European and South American elitists have always derided as a relative backwater, we’re about to find out if Pochettino is worth his hefty price tag.
The U.S. will face Bosnia and Herzegovina on Wednesday with a spot in the round of 16 on the line. The Americans are the favorites, and their fans are expecting — demanding — a win. For all the good vibes and good publicity that the former Paris Saint-Germain manager engendered by opening the tournament with convincing wins over Paraguay and Australia, that won't matter if he drops this next one.
Those are the stakes. And for Pochettino, it’s not a great position to be in. This U.S. team should beat the Bosnians. But it won’t be easy. Anything can happen in one match. An own goal. An early red card. And if they lose, the reasons won’t matter. After a hot start, at the first World Cup on home soil in 32 years, losing that one game would instantly render the entire Pochettino experiment an embarrassment.
Sitting behind the mahogany desk in his office at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in nearby Orange County two nights before a reserve-heavy U.S. lineup lost 3-2 to Türkiye on Thursday, Pochettino was as charming as could be. For 30 minutes, the charismatic 54-year-old laughed and joked with a small group of reporters. He insisted that he’d slept like a baby the night before the Stars and Stripes' World Cup opening 4-1 win over the Paraguayans, utterly convinced as he was that his beloved players would perform.
Toward the end of the roundtable session, I asked him if he’d be as relaxed when the knockout stage arrived.
"It needs to be the same," he told me, which is not the same as saying that it will be. "We need to prepare [for] the game, not thinking about ‘if we don't win.’"
Unpleasant as the thought is, this match against Bosnia and Herzegovina has "trap game" written all over it. In Pochettino’s 29 outings since taking over the U.S. program in October 2024, he’s faced European foes six times — including Thursday — and lost every single one.
The cold reality is that the outcome of this next game is probably close to a coin flip, and the World Cup co-hosts have a lot more to lose than to gain.
The U.S. has reached the round of 16 at the last three World Cups it has participated in. After Thursday’s loss, a visibly upset Pochettino struck an inexplicably defensive tone. "No one congratulated us [for] finish[ing] first in a very difficult group," he chastised the media members in the room, as if that’s a normal thing, as if the coverage of his team at this World Cup hasn’t been almost universally positive — including the game that had just ended.
Granted, this was a hugely inexperienced lineup (just three of Pochettino’s starters had ever started a World Cup game before, with two making their tournament debut) that had played well despite the defeat.
But a far weaker U.S. team survived a far tougher group in 2014, one that featured African power Ghana, a Portugal side led by an in-his-prime Cristiano Ronaldo and eventual champion Germany. Four years earlier, Bob Bradley’s squad topped a quartet containing England. Gregg Berhalter got to the round of 16 in 2022 with the youngest starting lineup in Qatar. And of course, Bruce Arena posted the USA's lone World Cup knockout win in 2002, almost a quarter-century ago.
So far, Pochettino has accomplished nothing close with his U.S. team. Not yet. That doesn’t mean that he can’t. He’s probably got a deeper roster than any of his predecessors. But now, because of the expanded format, he needs to win another game just to equal what his American-born predecessors managed time and again.
And none of those men had the huge advantage that comes with home fans supporting them. The only one that did was Bora Milutinović, who took the U.S. to the round of 16 way back in 1994, losing 1-0 to Brazil — another eventual titlist — with a squad that only had seven players under contract with professional clubs.
No wonder Pochettino is on edge. For a coach who has admitted that he wants to return to the English Premier League, getting eliminated in the round of 32 on the biggest stage possible, by an inferior opponent, could do lasting, potentially irreparable harm to his global reputation. Surely he knows that, too.
To be clear, this current U.S. team is absolutely capable of outperforming any that came before it. A quarterfinal trip is realistic. I’ve said consistently that, if they play as well as they can and get a little luck along the way, a semifinal berth is possible.
"In 2002, when I was involved in the World Cup [as a defender for Argentina], South Korea was in the semifinal," Pochettino, riding the high of being 2-0 at the time, said last week.
"Morocco was in the [semis] also in Qatar [in 2022]," he added. "Why not us?"
Well, getting anywhere close starts with a victory next week. The U.S. can do it, no question. The country fell in love with this team over the last two weeks for good reason. They play hard. They score goals. They’re good guys who care. They know that this summer represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the sport in this country, and they’ll do everything possible to seize it. No World Cup game is a forgone conclusion, but I firmly believe that the U.S. will beat Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 1 in Santa Clara. I’m sure of it.
For Pochettino’s sake, they’d better.
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