If anything will stick from the USMNT's mostly unmemorable 2-1 loss to Turkey last week, it'll be either Jack McGlynn's first goal with the team, or the unfortunate moment when Johnny Cardoso flicked the ball into Arda Güler's shin and into his team's own goal.
But the most illustrative moment from the exhibition match happened a few seconds before the ball was trickling past goalkeeper Matt Freese and across the goal line.
Alex Freeman had just won the ball from Juventus' Kenan Yildiz right outside the USMNT's penalty area. He shifted the ball over to Cardoso, who had the opportunity to play a quick, long, forward pass into tons of space on the left side of the field. Turkey had just lost possession, so it hadn't yet shifted into its defensive shape. Instead, Cardoso hesitated and then played a safe pass to Chris Richards. As this happened, U.S. manager Mauricio Pochettino threw his hands into the air, jumped up, spun around and yelled something toward the bench. A couple of seconds later, Freese was scooping the ball out of his net.
While the goal itself was a freak play -- somewhat bad luck that the ball was deflected in the first place, entirely bad luck that it deflected in such a way to then spin into the side netting -- the entire possession was a microcosm of the team's biggest problem under Pochettino: It plays too slow. While most of the modern USMNT era has been characterized by constant, hectic overactivity, the past couple of months have flipped back too far in the other direction.
Pochettino knows this; he addressed the play postmatch, reacting in the moment, and he made similar comments after the 1-0 loss to Panama in the Nations League semifinals. But if the team is going to make a run at the World Cup next summer, he's going to have to find a way to get his players to, well, run.
Why Pochettino's USMNT is the slowest on record
Pochettino has managed only nine U.S. games so far, and the general rule in the club soccer world is that we should wait 10 games before drawing any conclusions. But only three of those games were competitive, while a fourth, the third-place Nations League match, was what we'll call "partially competitive." Throw in the fact that the rosters and lineups have been significantly different across almost every international break, and it's still way too early to say anything remotely definitive.
The biggest difference between Pochettino's tenure and the Gregg Berhalter era that preceded it, though, seems to be the structure in possession. The latter had somewhat rigid positional guidelines for where everyone should be, while the former has given the players license to solve defensive problems on their own.
"The way we press [under Pochettino] is a lot more aggressive, especially from goal kicks," midfielder Luca de la Torre told ESPN after the Turkey match. "There's the intention to play in the half of the other team. And there's probably more freedom with Pochettino in terms of the positioning of the players to find the solutions in open play."
Midfielder Malik Tillman echoed De la Torre's final point. "He gives us offensive players a lot of freedom to move around the pitch to find the right spaces," the PSV attacker said. "With Gregg, there was a lot more focus on being in the same spaces."
Again, it's still way too early to say which approach is more effective, or if one is even more effective than the other. And while strict positional guidelines provide built-in fundamentals that the team can play within right away, the more relational style should theoretically take more time to develop since the players need to understand each other's inherent tendencies. The free-flowing approach could improve with time -- or it could be impossible to establish due to the ever-changing personnel and limited game time on offer in the international game.
Perhaps, too, this is why the team has struggled to move the ball at speed so far under Pochettino. It's hard to make decisions when you're not sure where your teammates are going to be.
Stats Perform has full data for USMNT matches going back to 2010. And among the managers who have been in charge for at least five games, Pochettino's team ranks last for:
- The speed it moves the ball upfield: 1.03 meters per second
- The number of possessions it has per match: 82.1
The former is pretty straightforward -- literally, how quickly do you move the ball toward the opposition goal? The latter represents, roughly, how much chaos you want your matches to have. For example: Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool played high possession games where the ball was constantly changing hands, while Pep Guardiola's Manchester City rank last in the Premier League for possessions per game almost every season. For comparison: Berhalter's teams moved at 1.34 meters per second and averaged 87.8 possessions per game.
This isn't to say that the slower approach can't work; clearly, it can. Pep's City won everything while playing slower than everyone else, while Mikel Arteta's Arsenal play very slowly, and they've finished second in the Premier League for three consecutive seasons. In general, European soccer has become more methodical and less hectic with each passing season.
At the same time, the three best teams in the world right now -- PSG, Liverpool and Barcelona -- all tend to play faster and embrace more chaos than is popular at the highest levels of the game. And most of the USMNT's best players are better off playing that way, too.
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Why the USMNT player pool wants to run
When it works, the slower approach keeps the ball away from your opponents, prevents the kind of odd-number counterattacks that Hansi Flick's Barcelona frequently face, and creates a low volume of high-quality chances.
Defensively, the team has been totally fine under Pochettino. The loss against Panama had nothing to do with a dysfunctional defense. The USMNT conceded three total shots for 0.1 expected goals -- if you could guarantee that the Americans would do that at every game at the World Cup next summer, then I'd tell you to go and bet on them to win the tournament right now.
No, the problem against Panama -- and more broadly -- was that the USMNT created a low volume of low-quality chances. If you're not going to take more risks and attempt more shots, then you have to be able to generate better shots with the few shots you do take. In Pochettino's nine matches, though, the U.S. has attempted 10.4 shots per game -- fewer than in any managerial tenure other than Dave Sarachan's lame-duck interim stint between Jurgen Klinsmann and Gregg Berhalter. But they've also generated only five total shots worth at least a third of an expected goal. For comparison, Berhalter's teams averaged 1.6 per game.
These are all of the 94 shots attempted under Pochettino, sized by the expected-goal value of the attempt:
Ultimately, the slower approach just doesn't really seem to fit many of the USMNT's best players. In attack, Folarin Balogun had his breakout season while playing in a transition-heavy approach under Will Still at Reims. Both Christian Pulisic and Timothy Weah are at their best when they're able to run at unsettled defenses. And at PSV, both Ricardo Pepi and Malik Tillman have been successful for Peter Bosz and his wide-open tactics.
In midfield, all of Tyler Adams' best seasons have come for the embracers of chaos at Bournemouth, Leeds and RB Leipzig. Weston McKennie continues to flourish despite the relatively conservative tactics at Juventus, but I think a lot of that is because his managers all realize they need to find a way to embrace the risks he takes off the ball. And at this point in his career, Yunus Musah's most valuable skill is his ability to break through pressure and create transition moments for his team.
Even at the back, Antonee Robinson is one of the most athletic fullbacks in the open field ... in the entire world. Chris Richards plays for a former Red Bull manager in Oliver Glasner at Crystal Palace. Sergiño Dest is probably the only first-choice player who seems totally comfortable in this possession-dominant, patient approach -- and he's still yet to play a game for Pochettino.
Now, there is a potential cheat code -- set pieces -- here. Without them, Arsenal would be a top-four challenger and a Champions League also-ran rather than a title challenger and a European semifinalist. If you can methodically create chances from set pieces, then you can afford to play a low-risk, slower style. Plus, if you score the opening goal from a set piece, then the defense has to soften up, and that makes it easier to attack.
Although the U.S. hired famed set piece coach Gianni Vio, we still haven't seen any of this yet. For all the possession the USMNT has had under Pochettino -- 60.4%, more than under any other manager -- it has attempted just 1.6 set piece shots per game, the fewest under any manager.
So, through the first nine games of the Pochettino era, we seem to have a coach who says he wants his team to play faster and a group of players who thrive at a higher tempo. Yet, somehow, they've struggled to ever get out of first gear. Perhaps Poch's public frustrations don't match with what he's telling his team to do. Maybe these players need stricter positional guidelines. Or it could just be some early-tenure growing pains.
The broader challenge for this summer, with the limited roster at the Gold Cup, and next summer at the World Cup, is for the USMNT to find a way to start consistently generating higher-quality chances on goal. And barring some development on the set piece front, the way to get there is to find an answer to what seems like a simple question: How do you get all of your runners to start running again?