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. Sign up for our free newsletter here In the moments after the USMNT’s 4-1 crash-out in the last 16 at this summer’s World Cup, Mauricio Pochettino took the podium for what many assumed would be his last press conference as the US head coach.

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…