USMNT’s Mauricio Pochettino says no player is a lock for World Cup roster as competitiveness remains priority

AUSTIN, Texas — A year after making his touchline debut with the U.S. men’s national team at Austin’s Q2 Stadium, head coach Mauricio Pochettino is back in Texas’ capital to mark the anniversary as their World Cup preparation enters a new phase with just eight months to go until the tournament on home soil. The origin story of how Pochettino reassembled the USMNT in a mold all his own, though, arguably began in March in the Los Angeles suburbs when two crushing defeats at the Concacaf Nations League forced a wake-up call.

“That was a time to assess, to see and the moment that we identified the problems,” Pochettino said on Thursday in the build-up to Friday’s friendly against Ecuador. “We start to destroy the things we need to destroy and start to build the house from the ground up.”

Those losses to Panama and Canada offered the most notable series of trials and tribulations in Pochettino’s first year on the job but seven months on, it also laid the foundation of the USMNT’s proverbial house. This month’s friendlies, which includes a test against Australia on Tuesday, mark the first time Pochettino will work with a first-choice squad after a year’s worth of player pool expansion, a healthy mix of mainstays and fresh faces. There are 12 players in camp that were not part of the 2024 Copa America roster, the last assembled by Pochettino’s predecessor Gregg Berhalter before he was fired following the USMNT’s group stage exit, many of whom have a realistic shot of making the World Cup roster next summer. Even those who earned call-ups under Berhalter, though, have been afforded a new lease on national team life – that’s certainly the case for midfielder Malik Tillman, who is back with the group for the first time since a breakout showing during last summer’s Concacaf Gold Cup.

“Maybe in the past, I didn’t have the opportunities to play as much as I do now,” Tillman said. “It’s just nice to be a part of the team.”

To some degree, the players that make up this month’s roster can be considered the frontrunners for spots on the World Cup squad but the audition phase will continue for at least another match. Attackers Christian Pulisic and Alex Zendejas did not train on Thursday and the same goes for defender Antonee Robinson, their status unclear for Friday’s game against Ecuador, while midfielder Tyler Adams will sit out this month’s matches while he and his wife await the birth of their second child. The situation may be imperfect but it fosters a new round of opportunity for those willing and able to make an impression, much as Tillman did over the summer.

“It’s a team sport so I think we always have this next man up type mindset,” defender Chris Richards said. “We love Tyler, we miss Tyler but somebody’s got to pick up his spot while he’s not here and it’s also their chance to earn a starting spot when he is here so that’s kind of how we’ve all looked at it. If you’re not in camp, regardless of what the reason is, it’s another guy’s chance to earn a spot and it’s going to be very competitive.”

Pochettino’s USMNT also comes with a newfound tactical flexibility, as last month’s matches against South Korea and Japan demonstrated. The head coach debuted a back three in the second half of a 2-0 loss to South Korea and used it again in a 2-0 win over a rotated Japan team, a long-awaited sign of progress after a string of unencouraging defeats.

“Different opponents, you’re going to need different kind of solutions but I think being able to play different formations, having guys who have different styles of play is going to make us unpredictable when it comes to big teams,” Richards said. “Hopefully we can throw a few teams off their game with the different qualities that different guys bring.”

The tactical evolution was a long time coming but Pochettino defended the amount of time it took to get the team moving in the right direction, describing it partially as a construct of the international schedule that forces coaches to work with players intermittently rather than day in and day out.

“I think it’s really important when you arrive at a new project, [you have] to let the people act in a very natural way and then see what is going on and to process the situation, to make the decisions that can hep, to build in a different way, to act, to behave and [in] the end, to perform,” Pochettino said. “March [was] the last possibility to see not only all the players but the staff and the federation, [the behaviors] that we need to change and sometimes you say, okay, that was really a wake-up call because I think [it] showed that why we were contracted, why they called us because Houston, we have a problem. We realize, I think that was the pin drop and we saw all, with all the information. I think from then, we started to work in a very intense way with the federation and try to change things that didn’t help.”

Even if the World Cup is approaching rapidly, the result may still be secondary for a USMNT that is still putting together the puzzle pieces for what they hope is an impressive showing on home soil next summer. The subtle details of a cohesive performance will be the priority this month, a sensible area of focus against the latest in a string of friendlies against opponents ranked inside FIFA’s top 30.

The areas of focus, as Tillman described them, were “getting closer connections, finding combinations on the pitch, having good relationships, obviously fighting for each other, being there for each other.”

Even as Pochettino’s USMNT remain a work in progress, though, the head coach cannot help but reflect on the greatest sign of improvement – a sense of competition that was once missing from the one-note team Berhalter left behind.

“The message to the other players,” Pochettino said, “[is] that we are watching everything. We are seeing everything and of course, that roster is not the final roster. it’s open. It’s really open for everyone. They need to perform.”

Pochettino name-dropped Sebastian Berhalter, a central figure during the USMNT’s run to the Gold Cup final but not a member of this month’s roster as a prime example of someone who is still in the race. He scored a brace in the Vancouver Whitecaps‘ 4-1 win over the San Jose Earthquakes on Sunday, and though he said it was a “football decision” to leave him off the roster this time, “this type of performance makes us to say maybe next time with us, but that is how you force the players that are here, seeing that type of behavior, attitude or performance, to improve.”

“I promise you, no one is sure that he’s going to be on the roster on the World Cup 2026. I don’t believe before it was the same way or not and today, I promise all the guys feel that they need to fight to be there and that is priceless because all feel that need to be invited, they need to go out of their comfortable zone and when you are out of your comfortable zone, only you can improve … It is one of the things that we changed in one year.”