Don’t tell Mauricio Pochettino that the United States got a favorable draw in the 2026 World Cup.
The United States men’s national team boss kept an even keel as he spoke with Fox Sports after the World Cup draw on Friday, as analyst and former USMNT great Alexi Lalas asserted it’d be an “absolute disaster” if they didn’t advance out of the group stage — before predicting they would win the group.
Friday’s draw has the United States in the same group as Australia, Paraguay and either Türkiye, Romania, Slovakia or Kosovo, depending on who wins the UEFA qualifiers playoffs.
“We need to show our respect to our opponents,” Pochettino said in response, while acknowledging an understanding to why Lalas was asking the question. “But I think we cannot win before we play. We cannot start to think about the next stage when we didn’t play and face these guys. And that is going to be, for me, a wrong message.”
The United States is already particularly familiar with both Australia and Paraguay, having defeated both nations in friendlies over the past two international windows.
Both matches ended in a 2-1 win for the Americans, and the Paraguay friendly ended in particularly chippy fashion with a benches-clearing brawl occurring near the end of the match.
“My message to the players is we need to compete better than Paraguay. That is going to be difficult,” Pochettino said. “Australia is going to be difficult and the team that’s going to join us is going to be difficult. We need to build our journey step by step and we need to prepare like when we start to play on the 12th of June, like it’s the last game, like the final of the World Cup.”
Any thought that the U.S.’s journey wasn’t going to be too difficult or that they should win the group “before we play the game, that is the wrong mindset,” Pochettino explained.
