The symbolism felt a tad heavy-handed, as if a scriptwriter had slightly overcooked the plot.
That the United States men’s national team should utterly humiliate Uruguay 5-1 ,the very opponent who dumped the Americans out of the 2024 Copa América in the group stage on their home soil, precipitating an all-out crisis. That the first of the USMNT’s goals on Tuesday, and the assist for the second, should come from Sebastian Berhalter, whose father, Gregg, was fired as US head coach after said Copa. That Berhalter’s successor, Mauricio Pochettino, should reclaim the program’s honor against his mentor, his “second father”, his “football father”, his “inspiration”, Marcelo Bielsa.
This story of retribution and rehabilitation would have been sent back for a rewrite. Too obvious. Too hackneyed. Too tidy.
All the same, the USMNT finished out 2025 by matching their biggest win ever over a South American team – and that one came back in 2016 against Bolivia, an inferior team to two-time world champions Uruguay.
“That victory doesn’t mean nothing for me, personally, because we need to build our journey until the World Cup,” Pochettino said in an oddly testy postgame press conference on Tuesday, where he got annoyed at being asked about missing regulars because he feels like there is no such thing. “But what I really, really appreciate from the team, the roster, and all the staff is the way we start to connect together. That is the most important thing. If we want to arrive to the World Cup and have the chance to challenge the big teams, that is the way we need to play.”
More pleasing to Pochettino than the score was that he had rotated most all of his team – who were already missing a handful of … stars, let’s call them, rather than regulars – after Saturday’s 2-1 victory over Paraguay, and that the collective had looked largely unaltered. “Nine changes, but [we kept] the ideas, the philosophy, the faith, the fight, the togetherness,” he said. “All the bench players were supporting the starting 11. That connection is amazing, it’s what we wanted.”
The Argentinian’s fixation on this continuity vindicated the focus of his work over the calendar year, when he refreshed the player pool with 71 callups and rejuvenated the team’s culture.
By posting a series of confidence and momentum-building results, punctuated by a head-turning one, the co-hosts will enter a World Cup year in a much better place than they might have imagined at the close of 2024.
Ever since a strong second-half in what was nevertheless a 2-0 loss to South Korea in September, the Americans have posted wins over three World Cup-bound teams – Japan, Australia and Paraguay – and played to a gamely tie with Ecuador, the second-best side in South American qualifiers. And now, as if to formally announce their intentions, they have recorded a beatdown of one of the international game’s most stories teams.
After Pochettino’s appointment in September 2024, an entire four-year cycle had to be crammed into just over a year. In this supercharged timespan, Pochettino made an encouraging start with an avenging 2-0 win over Panama in October 2024, after Los Canaleros – along with Uruguay – doomed the USA’s Copa América campaign; quickly crashed back to earth in a loss to Mexico; regained momentum in a pair of Nations League quarter-final wins over Jamaica last November; and then utterly disintegrated in losses to Panama and Canada in the Nations League Finals in March. This prompted yet another reset.
Pochettino saw it as a turning point. “All that negativity was a positive thing,” he said on Monday. “All this negativity we used to build this journey. That was, I think, when the reality touched.”
Yet dispiriting friendly losses to Turkey and Switzerland in early June made things look desperately bleak for the World Cup. But in response, a roster shorn of most anyone the casual fan might have heard of – again, not “regulars” – made a gutsy run to the Gold Cup final, where the US were finally overmatched by Mexico.
“I felt like we had a group of guys [at the Gold Cup] that really connected on a deeper level,” Berhalter told TNT on Tuesday. “That’s something that we really needed to build that camaraderie, that chemistry, and kind of building that into the next couple of camps. Guys have each other’s backs.”
Around this time, the USMNT finally and fully became Pochettino’s team.
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“That’s the main thing that we’ve been focused on – building that DNA and that grit, that hardworking mentality because that’s us,” said Diego Luna, one of the US’s scorers on Tuesday, and a Major League Soccer player elevated by Pochettino this year, who charmed the coach with his moxie. “That’s us as a country and that’s us as a team. Once you match that intensity and have that DNA, things like this [5-1 win] can happen.”
“Mauricio has expressed a lot of confidence for us to go out there and solve problems as we see fit,” echoed defender Mark McKenzie on Monday. “It’s not about Xs and Os; it’s not about the stuff we always see in videos. […] It’s just the aggressiveness, the mentality to win the ball back as soon as possible and just to be strong in both phases.”
This, in the end, has been Pochettino’s broader project for 2025: to build a foundation that will survive the tremors of a World Cup. The results have merely been the residue of that work, even as the numbers on the scoreboard ascended steadily from concerning to spectacular.
“After [more than] one year, we start to see the identity that we want to translate to our players, I think that is an important improvement,” Pochettino told TNT before Tuesday’s game. “[2025] was really difficult. All projects, when they start, it’s about analyzing and seeing what’s going on. But I’m happy. I’ve seen motivation, focus.”
After the final whistle rang through Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium, Pochettino did his best to wrap a reluctant Bielsa in a hug. The elder coach, who had once discovered a teenaged defender in rural Argentina in the dead of night some 40 years ago, was in no mood.
Something about apprentices and masters might have followed in this space, were it not so trite.
Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out in the spring of 2026. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.
