AUSTIN, Texas — Weeks after the U.S. men’s national team named its initial summer roster, the dominant conversation was not about who made the squad — but who didn’t. Most of the core group was absent due to injuries, Club World Cup duties, or, in Christian Pulisic’s case, a hotly debated need for rest.
In their place, head coach Mauricio Pochettino refreshed the roster not just to evaluate fresh faces, but to ignite more competition in his player pool. A 4-0 loss to Switzerland in the team’s final Gold Cup warm-up suggested Pochettino’s omissions — the “football decisions,” in his words — had backfired. But a commanding 5-0 win over Trinidad and Tobago to open the tournament paused early doubts.
Pochettino’s project, however, runs deeper than scorelines. After March’s deflating Nations League defeats to Panama and Canada, Pochettino began challenging the team’s internal standards.
“What we want to create in our national team is people desperate to come, desperate to perform,” he said. “To perform means follow the rules, create [a] good atmosphere, be part of the team, be able, in every single aspect, [to meet] our [federation’s] demand and understand that it’s possible (for it to) be the last [opportunity] to be with us.”
Then he made his point clearer.
“If you arrive to the camp and you want to spend a nice time, play golf, go for a dinner, visit my family, visit my friend — is that the culture that we want to create? No, no, no, no, no. What we want to do is to go to the national team, arrive and be focused. And spend all my focus and energy on the national team. Because we need to create this culture about winning.”
Pochettino insisted he wasn’t punishing individual players for the Nations League losses. But collectively, he clearly sought to adjust their approach to camp. It was always going to be a tricky balance after he inherited a veteran-heavy squad from Gregg Berhalter, one with a European pedigree that is unprecedented in USMNT history. And for players who spend most of their year abroad, coming back to U.S. soil — and U.S. camps — often means carving out time for family and friends.
“When we speak about the mentality of the national team, and you look at the most successful teams in the world, a lot of them go in to camp, and they stay at one place the entire time and travel to games,” midfielder Tyler Adams said the day before a friendly against Türkiye in Hartford, Connecticut, just 90 miles from his hometown in New York. “Based off the geography of the country, we’re traveling all over the place. We’re obviously playing abroad, and we come back home and it is nice to see your families. But we have to find the right balance.”
Adams, who captained the squad at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, will again be central to building that culture over the next year. So will center back Chris Richards, who has emerged as a leader this cycle and wore the armband against Türkiye.
“There’s a line that we kind of need to teeter-totter,” Richards said in Nashville, a few hours from his hometown in Alabama. “Sometimes in our off time, we’d want to go hang out with family a lot more than the guys are at the camp. But again, I think if you need to make this new culture with new guys, that you have to spend time with each other outside of the pitch. … It’s finding the line between friends and family, but also blending both of them, so that we have a good culture both on and off the pitch.”
Walker Zimmerman, a Georgia native and Nashville SC center back, echoed that view after starting against Switzerland.
“He’s just stressing the point that we need to be focused each and every day, especially in training,” Zimmerman said. “But I also think this staff is really good about, ‘Hey, when you have the day off, you can have the day off.’ You gotta have a work-life balance and enjoy it.”
And to a certain extent, Pochettino agrees. Before the Switzerland friendly, he emphasized the point with a typically lengthy response.
“I am the first person with my coaching staff who likes the players to be able to have free time,” he said. “ … They’re young boys, the young boys need to have different possibilities to be able to do things that are in this moment, when you are young. What I always say is when you have your work done, when your responsibilities are covered, after, yes, we can do all that we want. What we can’t do is not have all those things covered and I go out for a walk. If I don’t have my work done, I can’t go for a walk in Nashville to see the city. I do my work, and then I go to see Nashville.”
The Argentine circled back to an earlier comment he had made that drew attention: his criticism of golf outings and dinner plans during camp. What he’s really after, he stressed, is a fight-to-the-death level of intensity and energy on the field.
“I want 11 lions. Or wolves. Or the animal that you may like the most — the most aggressive. [I want players] on the field that may fight as if there had been death,” Pochettino explained. “But if we do all of that and enjoy life but after we don’t fight like a team, a true team, we raise a lot of doubts. It means there’s something that isn’t well, that isn’t balanced. The balance is the most important in all the soccer teams.”
Adams summed it up more succinctly:
“He talks about balance quite a lot, and mak[ing] sure that we understand that we need to be top professionals. That’s the most important thing.”
Pochettino believes that there is a specific psychological uniqueness to soccer compared to other team sports in the U.S., and he is not trying to create an overly regimented environment.
“This isn’t a closed system, it’s not the navy, it’s not a military camp,” he said. “It’s a soccer team that has to prepare itself to compete against another soccer team.”
Zimmerman added: “It’s not like we’re locked down at a hotel or anything like that, but from a culture standpoint, yeah, we’re focusing on the intensity in trainings, the intensity in the games and being competitive as a group.”
And when the Gold Cup began, the natural constraints of tournament life reinforced the shift.
“Everybody’s been focused on maximizing rest,” center back Mark McKenzie said. “Preparing ourselves with the training sessions, preparing ourselves with little things you do after the training sessions. And then when we get back to the hotel, kick your feet up. We got a player’s lounge and what not. So guys have time to laugh and joke and be together, continue to build on what we’re doing, but most important is making sure we’re ready for the next match.”
It won’t be the same group traveling throughout the U.S. next summer during the World Cup. But there could be more players on this Gold Cup roster than expected who will crack the squad or have a substantial role, and they’ll all have been part of a process Pochettino is prioritizing — calibrating a culture — that is definitely on a tight schedule.
“We’re all professional,” midfielder Brenden Aaronson said ahead of Thursday’s group stage match against Saudi Arabia. “We all know what we’re gonna do and what’s needed of us and how we’re gonna approach every situation. So for us, it was like, we’re gonna go out there and be really, really focused on the tournament. I think we always are, but for him to say that, and he had something to say about it, so for us it was just tunnel vision. Tunnel vision and just gonna come here and not do any of that type of stuff, and be really focused.”
This is Pochettino’s only tournament prior to the World Cup, and if the U.S. makes a deep run next summer, the intangible progress toward a winning culture will be spun as its legacy.