national team

A bowl of lemons sits on a table in the conference room Mauricio Pochettino has turned into an office at the U.S. men’s soccer team’s beachfront resort in south Orange County. The citrus fruit, the coach believes, has the spiritual ability to absorb negative energy. On the corner of another table, the flame from a candle flickers.

“I like candles,” says Pochettino, who believes they release therapeutic fragrances and create a calming environment.

But it is the massive, blood-red mural covering the entire south side of the room that truly reveals what Pochettino believes. In the center of the wall, just behind the coach’s desk, white block letters spell out “Why Not” above a script “U.S.,” which, despite the periods, is meant to be read as “us.”

Pochettino has turned the question in a mantra for a World Cup team that has answered it with two wins in as many games and has a chance to win a third match in the tournament for the first time when it meets Turkey at SoFi Stadium on Thursday.

The idea came to him during a team meeting last November when he sensed his players had doubts about their upcoming World Cup run. So Pochettino turned those doubts into a question. If South Korea could come from nowhere and make the semifinals of the 2002 World Cup, and if Morocco could do the same four years ago in Qatar, why not the U.S.?

Why not us?

“Hey, come on, guys, are you listening to me?” Pochettino said he asked the group. “We need to believe.”

Before he could convince his players, however, he had to convince himself. And that might have been the hardest part.

The 54-year-old Pochettino is a benevolent Svengali with a whistle; Ted Lasso with an Argentine accent. Belief isn’t so much a concept for him as it is a way of life. But when he and his coaching staff took over the U.S. team in the fall of 2024, following its disastrous performance in the Copa América, he said he inherited a demoralized, dispirited group.

“We received a big bang,” Pochettino said, mimicking a punch to the face. “We were knock[ed] out for a while.”

“We were so naive,” he continued. “The situation was way worse than we really believed.”

Pochettino refused to change the system that has brought him success at European clubs Tottenham, Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea. So he set out to change the players instead. That would take time, something he had very little of since he took over with the World Cup just 20 months away.

“It’s difficult to analyze the process, you know,” Pochettino said during an informal, 40-minute discussion at his team’s Dana Point hotel, the sun setting over the ocean through the open patio doors of his office.

“When you put the seed on the soil, [the] first seed, you don’t see nothing. Then you start to grow the tree. It was difficult to explain the plant because it’s not easy.”

The seed Pochettino planted with the national team took time to sprout. He lost five of his first 10 games, including a disastrous four-game stretch that included Nations League losses to Panama and Canada in the spring of 2025. The team’s supporters revolted, but Pochettino rejoiced.

“What happened, that was [a] good crash,” he said. “When we detect all the problems, we go for the solution. And we knew that the solution will arrive. The object is to challenge people.”

U.S. men’s soccer coach Mauricio Pochettino during the second half of his team’s World Cup match vs. Paraguay at SoFi Stadium.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

So he stayed the course.

“That was the process. Now is not a coincidence,” he said of the team’s success.

Pochettino has long believed that building a roster isn’t about picking the best players, but picking the right players. Players who fit his tactical approach, players who get along with one another, players who contribute to the team chemistry.

For him, the human connection, human respect is as important — if not more important — than the ability to dribble through tight spaces. And those traits are particularly important in a World Cup since the team will spend every day together for six weeks or more.

Although Pochettino’s team includes 13 holdovers from the 2022 World Cup roster, it also includes five players who made their national team debuts in the last 18 months.

Sometimes, he concluded, it is easier to simply change the player than it is to change what the player thinks or believes. And the newbies have totally bought in.

“We’re all in total belief. We’re all totally supportive and have faith in the process that he’s been outlining,” said goalkeeper Matt Freese, who made his first appearance for the national team more than 12 months ago and now is starting in a World Cup. “Our task was to keep believing, keep working hard and keep trusting. And we did that. We fully bought into the process.”

That process has made Pochettino the first U.S. coach to win a group stage in 16 years while his two victories in as many games match Bruce Arena, the most successful World Cup coach in U.S. history, who managed eight games over two tournaments.

The lemons and candles Pochettino keeps in his office are manifestations of energia universal or universal energy, a foundational concept common to many Eastern philosophies that believe a fundamental life force connects all things. Pochettino said he has long felt this connection and it has been a foundational part of his coaching.

But it doesn’t stop with the candles and citrus fruit. Pochettino also has filled the mural behind his desk with inspirational sayings.

“The talent has brought us here, but it is heart, effort and unity that will make us unforgettable,” one reads.

“If I dream of touching the moon, maybe I can get close to it. If I only dream of getting close, I’ll stay on Earth,” another says.

Each ends with the coach’s initials, similar to the way a painter signs his portraits.

Pochettino’s faith in the power of fruit and candles and his penchant for penning aphorisms hasn’t taken away from the ferociousness of his approach to soccer. Many players say the training sessions under Pochettino — which are intricate, focused and highly physical — are frequently more intense than the games. But most also are punctuated with laughter.

“Training is still very competitive, it’s very intense,” said midfielder Max Arfsten, who made his national team debut under Pochettino last year. “That’s the culture that the coaches created. Everyone’s still trying to prove something.”

Although Pochettino has spent his life in Argentina and Europe and still splits his time between houses in Barcelona and London, flying to the U.S. for matches and training camps, he’s been a quick study in this country’s culture and quirks.

“One of the things that we really like, and we learn from you, is in the way that you approach life. It’s more casual than formal,” said the coach, whose English is still a work in progress. “People are very approachable and make you feel comfortable. That, for me, was a massive surprise. You always want to welcome people.

“Even the music, even the food. People say ‘no, Americans have crazy food.’ Yes, you have crazy food. But also you have Whole Foods. In Europe, you don’t have a Whole Foods.”

And Pochettino has adopted it all. He’s become a big fan of country artist Lainey Wilson, went to hear Teddy Swims, a uniquely American genre-blending singer, last winter in New York, and is learning the words to John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the unofficial victory anthem of the World Cup team.

Perhaps more important, at times he’s taken his lemons and his candles and pushed them aside, replacing them with another distinctly American trait: the in-your-face confidence to will yourself to victory from the most hopeless situations.

It’s how Americans won at Valley Forge even before they were Americans and how they won on the beaches of Normandy when the concept of America was threatened. It’s how Americans went to the moon and invented the internet.

And it’s how Pochettino’s team has remained perfect two games into the World Cup.

“We’re American. We don’t take s—,” midfielder Sebastian Berhalter said Pochettino told the team during one meeting. “Even though he’s Argentinian, he has that mindset of, ‘Look, this is what we do. This is who we are. This is what America’s about.’ Even from an outside perspective, he showed us Americans what we’re about.

“He really drills that into us.”

For decades Americans have measured World Cup success in advancing beyond the group stage. Pochettino entered this summer’s tournament predicting a run to the semifinals, runs like South Korea and Morocco made.

“When people believe in each other, impossible dreams become possible,” reads another message the coach has scratched onto the wall of his office.

Why not us?

SEATTLE — Growing up the son of an NFL wide receiver, Alex Freeman said he felt a lot of pressure to play the American version of football, not the one the rest of the world plays.

“I always got asked if football was the path,” he said last summer. “But I always had a secret love for soccer.”

And he had to keep it a secret because he wasn’t sure his father Antonio, a Super Bowl winner with the Green Bay Packers, would understand.

But his stepfather did. Jake Hinkle introduced Alex to the sport and served as his first coach while his mother Rochelle urged him on.

Now his biological father, who last played in 2004, the year his son was born, has joined the cheering section as well.

“I was with him at the hotel,” Freeman said, “and he was just giving me those kinds of speeches that you hear from a dad. He’s just telling me to be myself. I think he knows that being myself has gotten me to this point. So why change that, right?”

Instead he put a massive exclamation mark on what has been a breakout 13 months by setting up Gio Reyna for the final goal of a 4-1 win for the U.S. in its World Cup opener against Paraguay. The U.S. returns to group play Friday in Seattle where it will face Australia, with the winner of the match taking the inside track toward advancing to the knockout rounds as the group champion.

Much of that still sounds like a dream to Freeman, who was playing for Orlando City’s reserve team in MLS Next Pro during the last World Cup. He wasn’t in the national team’s plans this time around either until coach Mauricio Pochettino called him in for an audition last year, something Freeman called a big surprise.

U.S. defender Alex Freeman kicks the ball over Paraguay forward Antonio Sanabria during the second half of a World Cup group stage match on June 12.

(Kelvin Kuo / Los Angeles Times)

But Freeman earned his first international start less than three weeks later, then played all but three minutes of the Americans’ six-game run through the Gold Cup, the team’s last competitive tournament before the World Cup.

Since joining the national team, Freeman has appeared in 17 consecutive matches and has become the ninth-youngest American to start a World Cup game.

Freeman, 21, is the youngest player on a young team, the second-youngest roster the U.S. has sent to a World Cup in more than three decades. That just doesn’t bode well for the future — it’s paying off in the present, too.

Reyna is on his second World Cup team at 23. Folarin Balogun, 24, had two goals in the U.S. opener, becoming the first American to score multiple times in a World Cup game in 96 years. And Chris Richards, 26, completed all 83 of his passes in the opener, the most without a miss by a World Cup player since 1966.

With an average age of 26.8 years, the U.S. is the fifth-youngest team in the World Cup. Leave captain Tim Ream, 38, out of the equation and only Ivory Coast and Ecuador have younger rosters.

Pochettino is being rewarded for giving those young players a chance, with five players making their World Cup debuts against Paraguay.

“He has this ability to find the potential [of] the young players and he is not scared to give them the responsibility to put them on the field,” LAFC goalkeeper Hugo Lloris, who played for Pochettino at Tottenham, told CBS Sports. “I can see a lot of coaches protecting themselves and try[ing] to not take that risk with the young players. But he’s not this kind of coach. If the young player deserve[s], he will be on the field.”

With Freeman, Pochettino broke with tradition in another way. Many national team coaches won’t call up players who aren’t starting for their club team, but Freeman has played more games and minutes with the U.S. this year than he has with Villarreal, the Spanish team he joined in January after appearing in only 32 MLS games with Orlando City.

The coach explained himself by saying he was choosing the “right 26” players for the World Cup, not the best 26. And Freeman fits Pochettino’s need for a defender who can transition seamlessly between a back three and back four, allowing the U.S. to play the kind of dynamic style the coach prefers.

If questions about his presence on the team have left him feeling slighted, Freeman says he’s fueled more by the adversity he has faced than by his recent success.

“Knowing that I’ve been in different environments, different situations, it’s how can I be consistently good, consistently solid, consistently making a difference?” he said. “Especially now in the World Cup, in another different environment. It’s how can I consistently help my team?”

A decade after making a clean break from football to play fútbol, Freeman says he has no regrets.

“I had to pick,” he said. “And soccer was the clear choice by far.”

Even his father, with whom he remains close, recently admitted as much, telling his son that playing in a World Cup beats winning a Super Bowl.

“Absolutely,” the younger Freeman said. “Seeing it now, especially throughout the last year I’ve been with the national team, knowing that it’s a different type of competition, it’s a different type of atmosphere? For sure.”

The U.S. men’s national team made its first World Cup game on home soil in 32 years one to remember, defeating Paraguay 4-1 in front of a sold-out crowd at Los Angeles Stadium (SoFi Stadium) in Inglewood on Friday night.

Here’s a look at some of the best moments before and during the game as captured by the Los Angeles Times photography staff:

U.S. fans march to Los Angeles Stadium (SoFi Stadium) before the start of the U.S.-Paraguay World Cup match Friday.

(Ronaldo Bolanos / Los Angeles Times)

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1. David Beckham, right, and Tom Cruise waves to fans before the World Cup group stage match. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) 2. Katy Perry, right, and Tius Luka perform during the World Cup opening ceremony before the U.S.-Paraguay match. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) 3. U.S. players, left, and Paraguay players enter the pitch before their World Cup group stage match. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

U.S. forward Christian Pulisic, right, controls the ball in front of Paraguay defender Juan Jose Caceres during the first half Friday.

(Ronaldo Bolanos / Los Angeles Times)

U.S. defender Antonee Robinson, right, and Paraguay midfielder Diego Gomez battle for the ball during the first half. (Kelvin Kuo / Los Angeles Times)

U.S. midfielder Weston McKennie celebrates after a U.S. goal in the first half against Paraguay. (Kelvin Kuo / Los Angeles Times)

U.S. star Christian Pulisic celebrates after a goal in the first half of a 4-1 win over Paraguay at the World Cup on Friday at Los Angeles Stadium (SoFi Stadium).

(Kelvin Kuo / Los Angeles Times)

U.S. players and coach Mauricio Pochettino, center, celebrate after a 4-1 win over Paraguay in the World Cup at Los Angeles Stadium (SoFi Stadium) on Friday night.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

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1. Paraguay midfielder Cristian Roldan heads the ball over U.S. striker Folarin Balogun during the second half. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 2. Paraguay forward Julio Enciso jumps over U.S. defender Chris Richards during the second half. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) 3. A stage is placed for the opening ceremony before the start of the U.S. vs. Paraguay match at Los Angeles Stadium (SoFi Stadium) on Friday. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Fans cheer during the United States’ 4-1 win over Paraguay at the World Cup on Friday.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

On a recent spring morning, Championship Soccer Stadium, which sits in a corner of the Orange County Great Park in Irvine, was quiet and empty save for the dozen sprinklers quenching a newly laid grass carpet.

Normally the well-used stadium is a buzz of activity. But its main tenant, the Orange County Soccer Club, which plays in the second-division USL Championship, has been temporarily evicted, left to train in the nearby park and play its final home game before the World Cup at Eddie West Field in Santa Ana, 12 miles away. (Not that it was necessarily a bad thing since the club drew a home-record crowd of 7,651 to its 3-2 win over Oakland on Saturday, which allowed it to hold onto second place in the Western Conference table.)

During the next month, the nine-year-old venue will have just one occupant, the U.S. national soccer team, which has chosen the stadium as its main training base for the World Cup. The temporary change in ownership is heralded by a giant orange orb the size of a hot-air balloon, adorned with the U.S. Soccer logo and tethered to a rise just outside the stadium.

Why and how the federation wound up in Irvine is unknown; U.S. Soccer declined to respond to multiple requests for comment. But it’s safe to say location was a factor since the Orange County Great Park is the closest World Cup training base to SoFi Stadium, where the U.S. will play two of its three group-stage games.

Crews work to prepare the training area for the U.S. soccer team at Championship Soccer Stadium in Irvine.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

The U.S. team’s first training session there, on June 8, will be the only practice open to the public. Four days later, the team will open its World Cup schedule against Paraguay in Inglewood, a 45-mile bus ride away. The Americans are one of seven World Cup teams to choose base camps in California. Australia and Paraguay will train in the Bay Area; Switzerland and New Zealand will be in San Diego; and Austria and Qatar will stay in Santa Barbara.

For the Orange County Soccer Club, which has just a humble spot on the U.S. soccer landscape, even a temporary association with the World Cup and the national team is worth celebrating.

“How can you not be excited about the host nation training in your facility when you are a club who prides itself on developing young talent,” said Dan Rutstein, the team’s president of business operations. “Sharing a stadium with the U.S. national team is a great opportunity.”

One that comes with great perks. FIFA, which vetted the location for World Cup teams a couple of years ago, has replaced the stadium’s grass field with one the Orange County team could never have paid for itself and will install security fencing in the next week or so, as it will at all 48 tournament training fields. U.S. Soccer is also expanding and improving the team’s tiny locker room and adding a media work room.

Alvaro Leon, Brian Biniasz, and Joesph Frausto install rubber flooring in the U.S. Soccer World Cup locker room.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

The Orange County Soccer Club is paying for those perks with a little inconvenience, however. The players will have to dress at home for practice, which will be held in the adjoining park. And the club’s next six games will all be on the road. The team also had to take down any signs or placards that mentioned the Orange County Soccer Club; they were replaced with USMNT signage.

“It’s their stadium now,” Rutstein said.

“If you look at what the club is trying to achieve and where we are as an organization, any short-term pain is more than offset by the medium- and long-term benefits of being associated with the World Cup and the U.S. national team,” he added.

The team is trying to sell naming rights to the stadium, for example, and its association with the national team and the World Cup could be a big help in that.

When FIFA first released potential World Cup training sites two years ago, Championship Soccer Stadium was on the list and Rutstein said about a dozen national teams sent representatives to have a look. How many bid on the site is unknown but FIFA rules say if two or more teams make a claim on the same venue, the team with the lowest FIFA world ranking gets first dibs.

The U.S. is ranked 16th, which clearly gave it an edge.

An aerial view of crews preparing the training area for the U.S. soccer team at Championship Soccer Stadium in Irvine.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Besides, Orange County is no stranger to world-class soccer. The only other time the World Cup was hosted in the U.S., in 1994, the American team trained in Mission Viejo. And when European champion Paris Saint-Germain came to Southern California for last summer’s Club World Cup, it trained at UC Irvine.

“Being away from the glare of a big city is appealing,” Rutstein said.

“The World Cup is going to do wonders for soccer in this country, as it did over 30 years ago,” he continued. “And we’re excited to make the most of that growth.”