Two years and one World Cup down, Mauricio Pochettino is still assessing

The US manager’s first squad of the 2030 World Cup cycle leans heavily on youth, injecting intrigue into the four-game window. I had a question for him: “Would you consider your tenure here a success?” His answer was full of the usual platitudes, but one thing did stand out. He said, more or less, that he and his staff had finally gotten a good idea of the player pool. It struck me as bizarre at the time. By almost every account, Pochettino had been brought in to win the game that he’d just lost.

Given just two and a half years to get it done, his job had never really been to evaluate the player pool; it had been to maximize results with the tools at hand, something he did with varying levels of success. And now, in the shadow of arguably the most disappointing result in US men’s history , we were finding out that it had been a fact-finding mission? And there were suggestions that he was leaving?

Read the original report at The Guardian.