Mauricio Pochettino's USMNT farewell was inevitable but it hurts all the same: 'A big thank you from my heart'

Pochettino will leave the U.S. team after two years in the job for Manchester United, the two-legged Concacaf Nations League quarterfinals against Haiti serving as his final matches Nov 13, 2026 at 12:47 pm ET • 8 min read Two weeks after the U.S. men's national team failed to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, an in-depth look at the man who would become the team's head coach seven years later was available on bookshelves across the U.K. and, eventually, everywhere else. "Brave New World" by Guillem Balague is just as much a glimpse at the 2016-17 Tottenham Hotspur team as it is at a manager on the rise in Mauricio Pochettino, who cut to the chase in a handwritten note before the first chapter."Football is," he wrote, "or at least to me, a context of emotions."There is supposed to be something ruthless about a sports team at the peak of its powers, and Pochettino's are no exception. He has built high-intensity, attack-minded teams for the better part of two decades, now on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, but he has never tried to strip humanity out of a profession that unnecessarily demands an emotionless approach to the job. It is why, at U.S. Soccer's national training center in Atlanta on Friday, he began to cry."The human being is in front of everything," he said, "and that is why that is a really difficult decision, but we need to move forward. But a big thank you from my heart."Pochettino finally booked his exit from the USMNT and will join Manchester United next week after two final games in the U.S., a two-legged Concacaf Nations League quarterfinal against Haiti on Saturday and Tuesday. Though United's approach only began on Sunday, after Pochettino and his staff arrived in Atlanta for the latest international break, the move was in some ways years in the making -- he had longed for a return to the Premier League, and as the USMNT's first coach with genuine international appeal, he had already turned down several offers before the Red Devils came calling. He was never destined for a long stay with the USMNT, even if the four-year deal he signed in August indicated otherwise, and U.S. Soccer knew as much by including a $10 million buyout clause in the latest contract. The predictability, though, did not lessen the pain.A reset after ChelseaPochettino did not answer questions about his legacy or discuss the appeal of the United job, but two years after U.S. Soccer's surprise coup, he finally offered a hint at why the USMNT gig appealed to him outside of the paycheck and excitement of a World Cup on home soil. He became the USMNT's head coach a few short months after exiting Chelsea despite the turnaround he was overseeing one year into the role -- he and the club's owners did not see eye to eye on what was next, and as a result, he initiated his own exit. He was one of several high-profile coaches in Europe's club game to drop out of that realm of the sport. Jurgen Klopp left Liverpool on a high and told CBS Sports a year later that he did not miss a thing about coaching, but he recovered from the mental exhaustion just in time to take the Germany job in late summer. Carlo Ancelotti is now in charge of Brazil, Thomas Tuchel is currently the England coach and Pep Guardiola also left Manchester City after a storied decade. Burnout was something at least a few of them name-checked on the way out, and in his own way, Pochettino concurred on Friday."I think the most important thing is all that we left here [are] the moments that we share together," he said. "All the things that we accomplished. The things that we put in place. All the standards, all together, we increased in that federation and around the world, too, maybe. I didn't prepare [this] speech. I am talking with my heart and I want to say a big thank you ... because we recovered our motivation. We recovered our capacity to dream big, the capacity to train players that really want to improve and really want to share good moments and players that really care about the federation and this country."If Klopp's timeline is anything to go by, two years appears to be the exact amount of time a coach needs to recover from the demands of soccer's most high-pressure environments before badly craving a return. Pochettino's U.S. arrival was a boon for the players, who had lost their way after a group-stage exit at the Copa America but now make up a team that has as clear a path forward as any. Forward Folarin Balogun said as much on Thursday, when Pochettino's exit was all but confirmed. "I think things have been working well," he said. "We have a clear sense of identity, we have a clear playing style, and whenever you have a top coach, you'd want him to stay, as it's a no-brainer, so I think for us it's no different."As it turns out, though, this job was just as meaningful for a coach who seemed to feel a little lost himself. In "Brave New World," Pochettino established that there is no distinction between the person and the coach. "Football has made me who I am and who we are as a family," he wrote. "It's what we wanted and what we chose to be. The ball has to be our travelling companion."It is no wonder, then, that he needed a reset somewhere. Some will quibble that the USMNT job should not be the place for a mental reset, but the way Pochettino describes it, it was the right job at the right time for all involved. He did not describe the post as a break from his real calling but rather as one that reminded him why he got into this career in the first place. It is perhaps why United, a perilous job in which most are destined to fail, has its charms for a person like Pochettino. He feels ready for what might be an impossible job, and the window to take it before he becomes a has-been to Europe's top clubs is fleeting. There is also an undeniable truth about the profession Pochettino has chosen -- job security is a fictional concept and so failure is the only guarantee. Someone else's shortcomings are the only way to get a job in the first place, something Pochettino admitted as he celebrated a year with the USMNT in October 2025. "I think we knew something [was] wrong here because if not, the federation, why [would] they call us?" he said at the time. "Why [would] they offer the job, no, really with not too much time to build our ideas, set our principles [for] the World Cup?"What Pochettino leaves behindU.S. Soccer has a fairly long runway this time to land a replacement, with the next World Cup just under four years away. The players, though, might feel left in the lurch for the time being as they watch a coach they really enjoyed working with say an abrupt goodbye. As Balogun put it on Thursday, "If I had a vote, I would like to keep things the way they are."Pochettino's tenure was hardly perfect. The shockingly bad results outweighed the impressive ones, but most of the games landed somewhere in the unremarkable middle. There was plenty of hand-wringing along the way, from an almost incessant period of trial and error to his insistence that players be fully committed to the project when he would say things that led people to question his dedication. He also never got the team to a long-awaited World Cup quarterfinal, failing to reset the energy after the Balogun affair sucked the confidence out of the group. Yet he left quite the impression on some of the players he worked with. Take Sebastian Berhalter as an example -- he was as far away from the national team's radar as it gets when Pochettino first worked with him last year but has only hit stride after stride since. He credits Pochettino's belief in him for the rise, which is perhaps why he was nearly as emotional as the coach himself when he spoke on Thursday. "Personally, on the field and off the field, he's done a lot for me, and from day one he's always believed in me. Before I set foot on the field, I think about the way I play and the way that I try to carry myself," Berhalter said. "He just said it doesn't matter what you're doing on the field; these are already the right things. And to be honest, I can't thank him enough, and regardless if he's coach, not the coach, and I say it every time that he's meant so much to me. And he's helped me develop as a player and as a person, and as a player, that's all you can ask for: to have that trust and have that belief in you. And for me, it's easy to go out there and just do my job, so he's meant a good deal to me for sure."It only makes the question of where U.S. Soccer goes from here so pressing. This was not a perfect tenure, and yet it hit the sweet spot of what all parties needed at this moment in time. That clearly includes Pochettino, who enjoyed the best of what the U.S. had to offer along the way, a celebrity of sorts in his own right. Maybe long stretches in the Southern California sunshine during the World Cup had an oversized influence, and "Take Me Home, Country Roads" slaps too hard when 60,000-plus sing it together. Whatever it was, the vibes, at their very best, were special. It is hard for a self-proclaimed "emotional guy" to deny that, even if he feels life needs to take him elsewhere."When this type of moment [arrives], [these] always are tough, tough moments because [these] are not easy decisions. Normally, it's the opposite. You know you will be sacked and you cry because you want to stay," he said. "A big thank you from my heart ... because you always were transparent and always you always put in front the interests of the federation but always trying to build something together and we really enjoyed. We learned a lot from you, from you all, from this country, [these] amazing people. Yes, I think it was one of the most difficult decisions in our careers."