FAYETTEVILLE, Ga. — Right on time for the most important competition in its history, the U.S. men’s national team feels like it knows exactly what it wants from coach Mauricio Pochettino, and how it can execute.
Putting his stamp on this group has been a long process for the Argentine manager.
Things were at a low with consecutive losses to Panama and Canada in the CONCACAF Nations League in March 2025, and have been on a slow build back upward ever since.
Sunday’s win over Senegal, though, marked perhaps the most convincing soccer the USMNT has played under his tutelage.
Throughout the 3-2 win, the Americans looked confident in how they wanted to play, and able to keep the physical intensity to do it convincingly.
“I don’t think we’re gonna change anymore,” Sergiño Dest said. “I think it’s too late to change any formations or whatever. I think it is what it is. We gotta get the best out of it.”
Though that is not, ultimately, Dest’s decision to make, going back to the same 3-4-2-1 base that worked well for the USMNT in the fall before it went a different direction and struggled in March marked one of the most notable developments of the weekend.
The U.S. has had spurts, and even full games, of looking quite good under Pochettino. But the nature of national team soccer, with the group convening sporadically and the roster varying in each window, meant there were always large caveats to those moments.
There was very little of that Sunday. Just a convincing 90 minutes, against a high-level opponent, in which the USMNT’s World Cup roster played the sort of game that Pochettino has long envisioned. Not perfect, but compared to their games in March, night and day.
“Sometimes we’re defending in a four, building in a three, fluid movement, guys can go, if they’re playing fullback and end up inside, then someone needs to fill their position,” captain Tim Ream said. “It’s so movement based to unbalance teams that it’s gonna look — depending on who’s looking at it and when you’re looking at it — it’s gonna look different at all points.
“We’ve worked on it so much that when we’re all in the correct structure and the right positions, it looks easy and it’s not. There’s a lot of fluidity to it. You have to be focused and aware and know where your guys are going or where they’re going to end up without really looking.”
It can look different even to different players. On Wednesday, after Dest had said he felt more like a right wingback than a winger in the system, Ream said, matter-of-factly, “Serge was a right wing.”
The positional semantics, though, shouldn’t obscure that Dest — and for that matter, Antonee Robinson on the opposite wing — had an excellent first half Sunday, scoring the USMNT’s opening goal after a 20-pass sequence in which the ball flowed from side to side until the defense was too stretched to compensate.
“At the beginning, we had to adapt a little bit,” Dest said. “For me personally, it suits me pretty well. The coach is the one who decides. We have to adapt if we want or not, but it’s working out well so far.”
Ream described it as a process of matching intensity and aggression with flexibility and fluidity. One that is, finally, falling into place.
“You have to think, you have to use your brain,” he said. “And it was tough, I think, in those early moments, to use your brain while physically you were killing yourself because you wanted to be a part of the group that is physically able to do it.
“And now you’re seeing guys who are physically in top, top condition and able to do it. And they don’t have to think about the movements. It just becomes automatic. I think we’re at a point now, here, everybody feels good physically and everybody’s not hands on their knees like, oh my gosh, this is a lot. And that translates into guys are — I wouldn’t say on autopilot, but guys know what’s being required of them structurally and tactically and they have the physical ability to do all that. And those two things have obviously come on over the past 12 months and put us in a really, really great position.”
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