"We were so naïve when we signed the contract," Mauricio Pochettino admitted this week. "We misjudged the situation. It was worse than we really believed." That's a remarkable thing to say when your team has just won their World Cup group for the first time in 15 years.
That gap between where the USMNT was and where it is now is exactly the story of this tournament. The Americans have two group stage wins — their most since 1930 — and six goals, one short of their all-time record for an entire World Cup. They've got fans singing John Denver in the stands. Paraguay and Australia got dismantled. Turkey is up next, and nobody is talking about the USMNT the way they were six months ago.
Four straight losses and a necessary crash
This didn't happen overnight, and it didn't happen smoothly. In March 2025, the USMNT lost to Panama in the Nations League semifinals. Then lost again. Then again. Four consecutive defeats. The talent was always there — Christian Pulisic, Tyler Adams, Weston McKennie, Folarin Balogun, Sergino Dest — but talent sitting in a comfort zone doesn't win tournaments.
Pochettino saw the crash coming and, by his own account, let it happen. "When we detect all the problems, we go for the solution," he said. "That was the process so that now is not a coincidence."
The structural problem was always time. Club managers get nine months a year with their players. Pochettino gets the USMNT every six to eight weeks. Changing a team's culture in those conditions isn't a project — it's a puzzle. His staff, many of whom have worked with him for years, ran intense training sessions and pushed hard on everything the players thought was normal. Not everyone enjoyed it.
Why not us?
In November 2025, Pochettino put three words in front of his squad: why not us? It sounds simple. After losing to Belgium, Portugal, and Germany in the buildup to the tournament, it also sounded optimistic to the point of delusion.
Then the World Cup started, and the switch flipped.
Pochettino compared it to gardening — you plant a seed, nothing happens for a long time, then one day there's a tree. The metaphor works, but what it doesn't capture is how quickly those trees can be cut down. The USMNT still has Turkey to navigate before anyone starts talking about deeper rounds, and the bracket only gets harder from here.
- First group stage win since 2010
- Two wins — most in the group stage since 1930
- Six goals — one shy of their all-time World Cup record
- Four consecutive losses as recently as spring 2025
Anyone who backed the USMNT to top their group at tournament outset was being bold. Anyone backing them to go deep now is looking at a team that just found its ceiling — and hasn't hit it yet. Whether the odds have caught up to that reality is the right question to ask before Turkey kicks off.
Pochettino once sat in a 100,000-seat stadium watching Texas vs. Ohio State and asked himself why American soccer couldn't generate that kind of pull. It's still a long road. But right now, at this World Cup, the question "why not us?" has a pretty compelling answer forming on the pitch.
