On Tuesday afternoon, at the tail end of a picture-perfect New York City day, US Soccer unveiled the 26 players who will represent the United States at the 2026 World Cup. With the Brooklyn Bridge as the backdrop, the federation rolled out players one by one, marching them through a pair of doorways flanked by steam cannon.
Nobody in attendance was terribly surprised at the players that populated the stage; the 26-man roster had already been widely circulated thanks to reports in the Guardian and the Athletic in the days leading up to the announcement. Late last week, the 55 players on Pochettino’s provisional roster received word of their status from USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino, with the 26 final selections receiving a video message from Pochettino himself. Quickly and somewhat predictably, news of those selections began to trickle out, and within 24 hours, the entire roster had been revealed.
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Pochettino’s selections caused the usual banter among fans, but a great deal of them also focused on something entirely different: the fact that he’d used email, instead of making a phone call, to inform the players who wouldn’t be making the cut. The approach has sparked widespread discourse among fans and former players, many of whom are saying that a phone call – or even an in-person meeting – would’ve been the correct way to deliver the difficult news.
Pochettino himself has stressed the importance of consistency in the way he communicates with players and said as recently as March that he had no plans to call players he planned to pass over. That fact has done little to cool the debate, and on Tuesday Pochettino got yet another chance to defend his approach to the media.
“What am I going to tell a player?” Pochettino said. “Am I supposed to lie? I am going to say that another player is on the roster because today, in this period, he is a better option. I am not going to say that he is a better player or that you cannot make the roster in the future. There are 55 players on the provisional roster – and now I need to call [all of the players who didn’t make it?] Do I need to do that in March? In January camp? That is not the way.”
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Landon Donovan, the USMNT’s joint all-time leading scorer and a veteran of three World Cups, was famously cut from the US squad for the 2014 tournament. In that instance, then-coach Jürgen Klinsmann sat him down personally and gave him the bad news. On Tuesday, Donovan offered a more nuanced take on Pochettino’s approach.
“I can understand where he’s coming from,” Donovan told the Guardian. “To some extent, I was thinking about it this morning – not hearing from him directly might actually be a good thing. It’s a shitty situation, it’s not gonna change anything. Yes, if I was a part of the team for a long time, I would’ve wanted a phone call. If I’d not been part of the team for a long time, I wouldn’t have cared. Every player is different, though.”
Some former USMNT members, such as 2010 World Cup veteran Herculez Gomez, have criticized Pochettino’s approach openly, calling it “diabolical”. The former LA Galaxy attacker was quick to point out that former US coaches Bob Bradley and Klinsmann made sure to have individual conversations with cut players. In 2014, Gomez remembered, Klinsmann called personally to tell him he wouldn’t be part of his roster despite the fact that Gomez hadn’t played a match for the national team in nearly a year.
“This is a harsh, harsh way to treat players that have for better or worse given their blood and sweat,” Gomez said. “Diego Luna was the second-most capped player on this team. And you mean to tell me you didn’t even pick up the phone and speak to him? … You look and there’s World Cup commercials of him playing the World Cup final versus Brazil. You had no problem milking him for the marketing dollars and the least he deserved was an explanation.”
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Some have suggested Pochettino could have at least called the handful of players – like Luna, midfielder Tanner Tessmann and others – who were truly on the bubble and taken a more personal approach. But that presents an entirely different problem. Though Pochettino is frequently viewed as a single-cycle coach, the possibility remains that he stays beyond 2026. Offering a different approach to some players and not others could realistically cause resentment within the group, particularly among the players he didn’t call.
Pochettino himself was left out of Argentina’s World Cup plans in 1994 and 1998 and said he did not expect, or even want, a personal touch when it came to those decisions. Similarly, he cited his experience being moved on from during his coaching career as formative for how he’s dealt with players at the national team level.
“When I was sacked in different clubs – one was in Tottenham,” Pochettino said. “And [former owner] Daniel [Levy] says ‘I want to talk to you.’ What do you want to talk about with me? After you sacked me? You [should’ve talked to me] before you sacked me. Not after, when you make the decision. I have nothing to say then.”
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Pochettino has until 1 June to submit a final roster to Fifa and can make emergency changes to it to address injuries until the day before the US opener against Paraguay on 12 June. Players like Luna and Tessmann have not yet spoken publicly about being passed over, or how those decisions were communicated to them, and there’s at least a small chance they could still find themselves in Pochettino’s plans.
Some, like Donovan, suggested on Tuesday that national team coaches need to bear that dynamic in mind.
“I’m not a betting person but I think the odds are that someone on that alternate list is going to end up on the team,” Donovan said. “So you want to keep players involved, around and excited in the event that happens. I’m sure Pochettino realizes that.”
Still, Pochettino held fast in his belief that players, generally, do not want to be spoken to about being excluded.
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“The players didn’t make the roster, they don’t want to hear me apologize,” he said. “I care. Do you know why I care? For two weeks I did not sleep. And even today, I cannot enjoy the 26 guys in front of me because I am still thinking about guys that are out. That is to care. If I call [the players I cut] it is about myself. If I call, I say ‘I am very human about calling and giving an explanation.’”
“Come on,” Pochettino concluded. “That is bullshit.”
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