"Personally, I would love it if he stayed on." That's Brad Friedel, and it cuts to the heart of the most interesting question hanging over U.S. Soccer right now — not who wins Group D, but what happens after the final whistle of a home World Cup.
Mauricio Pochettino's contract expires when the tournament ends this summer. At one point, that looked like a natural exit ramp toward a return to club football. Manchester United, Chelsea, and Tottenham all needed managers. Real Madrid looks set to bring back Jose Mourinho. AC Milan are still searching. The queue of top jobs was long, and Pochettino's name was near the front of every conversation.
Then those jobs got filled — or are getting filled. And suddenly the question of whether Pochettino stays in charge of the USMNT has moved from hypothetical to genuinely possible.
Friedel's cultural argument is the one worth taking seriously
Friedel, speaking in association with MrQ, didn't just offer warm words about Pochettino. He diagnosed the actual problem facing American soccer — and it's not the stadiums, the coaching education, or the talent pipeline at youth level. All of that, he says, is fine or improving.
The problem is culture. Football isn't the main sport in the United States, and until it is, the country will never consistently produce athletes who dedicate everything to the game. The NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB are all competing for the same pool of elite athletes and obsessive fans. Football keeps getting a smaller slice of both.
"Until we have that, we just have to keep trying to build the sport as much as we can," Friedel said. It's a sobering take from someone who played the game at the highest level for decades — not pessimism, just realism.
He also pushed back on the population argument that comes up constantly in these discussions. 350 million people should produce a dominant footballing nation, the theory goes. Friedel isn't buying it. India, China, and Pakistan are all in the top ten most populous countries in the world. None of them are threatening Brazil anytime soon. Brazil works because football is embedded in the culture, not just available in it. That's the gap the U.S. still needs to close.
What Pochettino actually deciding looks like
Friedel floated an intriguing structural possibility — that with sporting director Matt Crocker having departed for Saudi Arabia, there could be room for Pochettino to take on a broader role. Something combining a joint sporting director and head coaching function, using the two-and-a-half years he's already spent understanding the landscape of American football to shape the program at a deeper level.
Whether Pochettino wants that is another matter entirely. He'll have options. The question is whether he sees the USMNT project as unfinished business or a chapter that ended neatly with a home World Cup.
The squad for the tournament is set — 26 players named, with pre-tournament friendlies against Paraguay (June 12, SoFi Stadium) and Australia (June 19, Seattle) before a Group D that includes Turkiye on June 25. Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie headline a generation that genuinely believes it can make an impact on home soil.
If that generation goes deep into the tournament, the contract conversation gets a lot more complicated — and a lot more interesting.
