Less than a year out from the 2026 men’s World Cup, hosted in the United States, Canada and Mexico, there is suddenly plenty of drama happening with the U.S. men’s national team that isn’t about its recent form.
The back and forth between captain Christian Pulisic and coach Mauricio Pochettino over Pulisic’s decision to sit out the CONCACAF Gold Cup this summer has earned plenty of headlines. And it has been fascinating to watch from a distance via the lens of covering the U.S. women’s national team.
There will always be tensions between players and a head coach to varying degrees. But I have never seen anything like this on the women’s side of the sport. The closest comparison I could come up with was Ali Krieger’s long call-up drought before suddenly coming back into the fold for the 2019 World Cup, though it’s not a perfect comparison, as public comments from both sides stayed polite. Even the surprising decision from coach Emma Hayes, right after joining the U.S. team, to leave Alex Morgan off the 2024 Olympic roster was largely covered as a pure soccer decision.
With the men, there are some inciting factors ramping up the heat. And the coaches of the two U.S. teams — former colleagues at Chelsea, as managers of the London club’s men’s and women’s teams during the 2023-24 season — find themselves in opposite scenarios.
An imminent World Cup being played largely on American soil, increasing workloads for players, the changing media landscape and the weight of former player voices, and even the high-profile nature of the men’s head-coaching role for U.S. Soccer, are all escalating this from a single player’s choice to contentious national discourse.
On the field, the recent form from the U.S. men — the first match of the Gold Cup aside — has been lackluster, and the pressure is on not just to be prepared for a home World Cup but to perform well in it.
Meanwhile, for the women, 2025 has been a rare release of the pressure valve. This year is a slow build into World Cup qualifiers next summer, and the team is at the start of a new cycle leading into the 2027 Women’s World Cup in Brazil and the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
For the women, the pressure is to win. For the men, it feels like something much closer to avoiding embarrassment on the international stage. The failure to qualify for the 2018 men’s World Cup still lingers, even as the player pool has largely turned over in the years since.
Playing at home in a World Cup now less than 12 months away has cranked up pressure on the U.S. men’s program to a level it has never actually experienced before.
Workload is also a factor. Players seem to be reaching a breaking point with the combined demands of club and international soccer, and are more willing to acknowledge their own need for rest as they put more and more minutes on their bodies.
After criticism over his decision to rest — including from former U.S. players such as Landon Donovan and Tim Howard — Pulisic wanted to clarify that he was open to playing in two of the recent warm-up matches, but not the Gold Cup. Pochettino responded that while he understood Pulisic’s line of thinking, he selected the same roster for those friendlies as the tournament itself because he considered it “a really important competition.”
But Pochettino’s full response is where the discourse fully leaped into drama. The coach said he would judge Pulisic just as he would any other player, and not as a star.
“If he performs well and he is the best, it’s normal he’s going to have a place in the national team,” Pochettino said.
He added: “When I signed my contract with the federation, it said I am the head coach. I am not a mannequin.”
When Hayes did not rotate her lineups during the Olympics, a tournament known for its compressed schedule and increased demands on players, she faced questions about workload. Hayes coached her players through those three weeks by comparing the tournament to a “pain cave,” a concept used by ultramarathoners running hundreds of miles.
“The reason I want to play the team together for as long as possible is because I want them to develop that. I want them to suffer. I want them to have that moment because I do not believe you can win without it,” Hayes said as the U.S. advanced to the gold medal game — and eventually took the title home.
Pochettino made a similar justification when explaining why he wanted the same roster for the Gold Cup and the two friendlies leading up to it.
“But it’s common sense for us to build a roster to come to these two friendly games to prepare for the Gold Cup because, for us, the Gold Cup is an important tournament,” he said.
In this clear juxtaposition between the two U.S. national teams, Hayes has actively chosen to give almost all of the team’s European-based players a rest for the upcoming camp and three friendlies. Her roster, announced Wednesday, featured only one player who plays in Europe — Naomi Girma, the vice captain and now a defender for Chelsea, was included as she builds back from an injury in March that meant over a month on the sidelines.
“This is the first opportunity, and the only one for them, to take a break between now and the World Cup in two years,” Hayes said, “and player welfare and rest and recovery are also important for these players.”
Hayes said Wednesday that while the increased player load across club and country is a conversation she can be a part of, her specific role is to work with each individual player.
“All I can control is that in 2027, there is a World Cup and this player has this number of games, this is their season window, this is the international call-ups that they might receive, this is their offseason, this is their rest period,” she said. “Every one of them is different. My job is to educate the player.”
While Hayes viewed differences in player load between the European club game and the NWSL right now, the end goal was the same for her.
“Our players need to develop resilience to be able to tolerate the load,” she said.
That said, how she manages a player like Emily Fox, who just won the Champions League with Arsenal, is different than how she will manage an older player with a history of injuries or a young debutante with the national team who has stayed healthy.
While Hayes has the luxury of two years to build to Brazil 2027, Pochettino was brought in to replace Gregg Berhalter last September. There is a difference between the demands of a major tournament and the games one year out from one. Regardless, the discussion has not stayed on the actual structural issue at fault because the drama has superseded it.
Maybe this was unavoidable, though, thanks to U.S. Soccer’s approach to hiring.
For both the men’s and women’s national teams, the federation has hired big-name coaches who create news cycles and have drawn off some of the coverage that might have otherwise gone to the players.
Pochettino is already in an uncomfortable spot because of the state of his team. Defensiveness should not be surprising.
There is a break in the clouds, at least. The men got their opening win in the Gold Cup, 5-0 over Trinidad and Tobago, and won again Thursday, 1-0 over Saudi Arabia, giving them a chance to cut through the noise of the negativity building over the past few weeks. The team faces Haiti on Sunday for the final match of group play but has already advanced to the knockout stage of the tournament.
While strong results always help smooth things over, there is still plenty to be resolved, at least publicly, between Pochettino and Pulisic.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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