Mauricio Pochettino urges USMNT to treat every World Cup game ‘like a final’ | Mauricio Pochettino

Mauricio Pochettino said it was “neither an advantage nor a disadvantage” that the United States’ World Cup group is made up of two – and perhaps three – teams that his team will have faced in a friendly within about a year before kicking off its opening match.

The United States was drawn against Australia, Paraguay and the winner of the European play-offs involving Turkey, Romania, Kosovo and Slovakia. The United States faced Australia in a friendly match in October, winning 2-1 in Commerce City, Colorado. They faced Paraguay in another friendly in November – a match which marked Gio Reyna’s return to form with the national team in a 2-1 victory. Turkey, should they manage to qualify for the play-offs, would have a head start on their preparations, having beaten the United States 2-1 in a pre-Gold Cup friendly in June 2025.

A lot can happen in a year. And Pochettino, like his Australian counterpart Tony Popovic, stressed that the circumstances surrounding friendlies are entirely different to those at the World Cup, where the whole world will be watching and the stakes could hardly be higher.

“The reality is that circumstances will change,” he told reporters. “That’s why they will be completely different matches, perhaps with different squads or players.”

Pochettino was full of praise for the prestigious, sometimes bizarre event, which took place with the pomp, circumstance and considerable duration typical of almost every draw event for an international football competition. Now that the matchups are determined, Pochettino said his main goal with the players will be to impress upon them the weight of expectation and the urgency with which he expects his charges to act now that the path ahead of them has finally been mapped out.

Recalling his only World Cup experience as a player with Argentina in 2002, Pochettino said that after returning from the South Korea-Japan tournament he sank into a “massive depression”, having fulfilled a childhood dream and seemingly having little left to look forward to for the rest of his career (which, by the round of 31, was drawing to a close).

“Your biggest dream disappears, and then you feel like there won’t be another opportunity to be a part of that,” Pochettino said. “That’s the biggest energy I want to convey to the players. It’s the most incredible event and the most incredible feeling you can have. We can work on fitness, we can work on tactics, but we have to feel. Put everything in. It’s today. We will have a country behind us. »

To that end, Pochettino said that, as intense as he expects preparations for the group stage to be, he and his team aren’t looking too far ahead — discussing possible second-round clashes (which could include a rematch of the 2014 round of 16 with Belgium, among several other intriguing possibilities) in the car between the Kennedy Center and the site of his press conference is about as far as it’s gotten.

“If you are Argentina, the best team in the world, maybe you can look at what happens next,” Pochettino said. “With the United States, the first game is the World Cup final. The second game must also be the World Cup final.”