Mauricio Pochettino has agreed to remain the U.S. men’s national team’s head coach. Is an extension warranted after that performance in the World Cup’s Round of 16?
Or, put a different way: Is it fair to judge 22 months of work by a single 90-minute performance? Is one game reason enough to label an entire head coaching tenure to-date a failure?
In a vacuum devoid of any further details, obviously not. Even once we leave the vacuum and say “yes, we’re talking about Mauricio Pochettino’s time at the U.S. helm and the Yanks’ humiliating ouster from the 2026 World Cup,” it feels like the logical, sensible answer should be: no.
It’s one game. It’s soccer. Bad days happen. And in the specific case of the United States’ embarrassment against Belgium, maybe a bad day becomes more likely to happen once the team finds itself dragged under the global microscope for a corruption pseudoscandal involving no less than the considered Leader of the Free World.
But even if you point the finger for the U.S. humiliation at Donald Trump attempting the most ham-handed intervention in the history of ham-handed interventions, we can widen the scope and go on. Pochettino also wasn’t responsible for the U.S.’s 24-year absence from the World Cup quarterfinals. He isn’t responsible for Concacaf’s lack of a traditional Euros- or Copa America-caliber competition that would help the World Cup feel more like a critically important soccer tournament and less like the entire reason for American soccer’s existence. He wasn’t responsible for 40 million American television viewers – forty million expletive-deleted people! – tuning in for the first U.S.-hosted U.S. Round of 16 game in 32 years.
