Mauricio Pochettino, wine connoisseur and soccer alchemist, gets to work

AUSTIN, Texas – To begin to understand Mauricio Pochettino, the new U.S. men’s national soccer team coach, one must start with wine.

Aside from soccer and family, nothing captures his Argentine heart like a nice bottle of red. When he was a player, Pochettino signed with Bordeaux instead of a Spanish club because he would get to live in what he calls “the best wine region in the world.”

When they began wooing him to replace Gregg Berhalter a few months ago, U.S. officials made sure to bring a bottle of wine to the meeting.

“Whenever I am slightly down, I like to smell Argentine wine,” Pochettino said in Guillem Balagué’s 2017 book, “Brave New World. Inside Pochettino’s Spurs.”

“It makes me happy and takes me back to my country, to recognizable places,” he said, “to when I was a boy, the redolence of the countryside.”

Which brings us back to soccer.

Danny Rose, who played for Pochettino at Tottenham Hotspur from 2014 to 2019, told Balagué of visiting the coach’s London home and marveling at his collection.

“He explained so much about the wine, where and how you plant the vines, what grape to use, and how you look after them, how the grapes turn out according to how you treat them,” Rose said.

“Very much,” Rose added, “like a football team.”

A month after signing onto the U.S. project, Pochettino this week began the alchemic task of crafting the perfect blend before the 2026 World Cup comes to North America. Training camp in Austin will precede his debut Saturday against Panama at Q2 Stadium.

An accomplished club coach for 15 years on Europe’s grandest stages, the 52-year-old Pochettino is a first-timer on the international scene and a fresh face for a program that lost its way this past summer at Copa América.

“What we want to feel from them is the commitment, the personality, the character, the capacity to adapt to a new era, a new way to approach the games,” he said last week. “That is going to be the key – the capacity for them to think in the collective, to give everything, to try to be better.”

With only seven additional camps over 18 months before final World Cup preparation begins, he must start to, in his words, “set the principles.”

Pochettino brings with him principles and coaching acumen that produced more than 300 victories with five clubs, most notably Tottenham, which advanced to the 2019 UEFA Champions League final, followed by short tours at Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea.

When U.S. camp opened, Pochettino conducted meetings with the team as a whole and individual sessions with players.

“As the hours have ticked by, you see certain guys getting pulled to have sit-down chats,” defender Tim Ream said. The coaching staff, he said, wants “to get to know us and obviously we want to get to know them.”

“The message is he wants to win,” Ream said. “He has his principles, he has his ideas, but at the end of the day, it’s about winning.”

Winning right away is not urgent – both Saturday’s game and Tuesday’s visit to Mexico are friendlies – but Pochettino would like to instill a winning mentality after the team’s 1-4-2 stretch between June and September.

He has good young pieces with which to work, just as he did with Premier League clubs Southampton and Tottenham. Under his tutelage in England, Tottenham’s Harry Kane, Son Heung Min and Dele Alli reached new heights. He also coached Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Neymar at Paris Saint-Germain in 2021-22.

Led by AC Milan star Christian Pulisic, the U.S. program features players primarily between ages 21 and 26. The young Americans have shown promise, advancing to the 2022 World Cup’s round of 16 and surpassing Mexico for regional supremacy, but stumbled in Berhalter’s second term.

Pochettino will begin his tenure with many holdovers but without several injured regulars, including Tyler Adams, Tim Weah, Sergiño Dest, Folarin Balogun and Gio Reyna.

Pochettino put the current group to work right away – “straight into training and it was a tough session,” left back Antonee Robinson said. “We were kind of ready to work and so it was definitely intense.”

Pochettino’s tenets stem from his early playing career under Jorge Griffa, the youth coach at Newell’s Old Boys in Argentina.

“He didn’t spin yarns like a poet,” Pochettino said of Griffa in Balagué’s book. “On the contrary, he was very direct, and his words would get straight through to you, resonating deeply.”

Pochettino calls Griffa a “second father.” His real father, Héctor, was a decent player who gave up the game to tend to the family’s farmland in Murphy, a town of 3,500 founded by an Irish immigrant and sitting more than 200 miles from Buenos Aires. When he was 12 or 13, Pochettino was driving a tractor. At 14, Pochettino moved 90 miles to Rosario to play in Newell’s Old Boys’ youth system.

Like most Argentines, Pochettino idolized Diego Maradona. A poster of the dynamo stood guard over his bedroom. Years later, when he was a young defender for Newell’s Old Boys, Pochettino was instructed to make a welcoming phone call to the newly acquired Maradona, who, at that time, was a World Cup winner and global phenomenon. They would room together on road trips.

The other great influence on Pochettino’s career was Marcelo Bielsa, a renowned coaching figure in Latin America and Europe. Bielsa tutored Pochettino at Newell’s Old Boys, Spanish club Espanyol and the Argentine national team, including in the 2002 World Cup. The third of Pochettino’s 20 national team appearances – all under Bielsa – came against the United States in 1999 at Washington’s RFK Stadium.

Bielsa’s style – on display with the Uruguayan national team after a four-year run at England’s Leeds United – is intense and fast-paced, with a press that makes opponents uncomfortable when they have the ball.

Speaking to reporters last week, Pochettino said: “Soccer needs to be an exciting game for the USA citizen. They need to enjoy every time they go to the stadium.”

To reach that point, though, “When we lose the ball, we need to be desperate to recover as soon as possible,” he said. “We need to enjoy defending.”

In Balagué’s book, Pochettino says he wants his teams to “provoke a controlled disorder, to create so much movement that it distresses the opposition.”

While the U.S. players adapt to him, Pochettino is making adjustments of his own – from the daily rigors of coaching a club to the intermittent, concentrated bursts of international soccer.

“It’s not easy to be a coach, but more difficult to be a coach in a national team, because players arrive tired (from) traveling with all the pressure they suffer in the clubs,” he said last week. “It’s important to find a good balance in between for them to have the possibility they need to be happy. They need to enjoy the way they will be in the camp.”

Pochettino brought with him his longtime assistants, as well as his son, Sebastiano, a sport scientist who worked for his father at Tottenham, Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea. Pochettino’s youngest son, Maurizio, is a midfielder for Ibiza Islas Pitiusas in Spain’s fourth division.

Pochettino and his wife, Karina Grippaldi, raised their boys in Barcelona – the city where he enjoyed two playing tenures for Espanyol (1994 to 2001 and 2004 to ’06) and launched his coaching career with the same club (2009-12).

Barcelona remains home, but America is now his workplace.

“It’s an amazing project and challenge we have ahead,” Pochettino said. “I hope we can enjoy a great journey.”