Key Points
- US national team struggles in CONCACAF Nations League semifinal and third-place match
After a disappointing loss to Panama in the CONCACAF Nations League semifinal on Thursday, Pochettino had called on his team to play with more urgency and take greater risks in Sunday's third-place match against Canada. However, his requests seemed unheeded as the team delivered another underwhelming performance, failing to register a single shot - on or off target - in the first 30 minutes at SoFi Stadium on Sunday.
This disappointing display adds to the frustration for the 2026 World Cup cohost, who will return to the same venue for their tournament opener on June 12 next year.
Despite the setbacks, Pochettino, who took over after Gregg Berhalter's troubled second stint, remains confident that his team will be in better form by then.
"There's a lot of examples in different years of teams that were building to play in a World Cup that were not good until they arrived at the World Cup," Pochettino said.
"So I want to send a message to the fans 'Don't be pessimistic; don't get bad feelings.' It can happen. But the main objective is the World Cup. It's always painful when you lose, but we need to accept it. But I don't want people to feel pessimistic. We are all disappointed that we didn't win, but I'm not going to allow us to feel pessimistic because I think we have good players.
"We are going to find a way to perform, and for sure we are going to compete and we are going to get different results from those that we got from Thursday and today," he added.
Pochettino did acknowledge, however, that if there is no improvement over the next year of preparation for the World Cup, it would be a cause for concern.
"If we are in this situation, in one year's time, for sure, I will tell you, 'Houston, we have a problem. S.O.S. But you will see in one year if we are talking about that, we will have a big problem. Because it will mean that we were not capable of discovering and designing a better strategy to provide the team with the capacity to play in a different way. I think we have time. I prefer that what happened today, happened today and not in one year's time," Pochettino said.
United States skipper Christian Pulisic said that "some things need to change" following Sunday's loss.
"Obviously disappointed. We've gotta come back from this, we're not at our best at the moment. All we can do now is go back and be the best example we can be at our clubs ... and when we come back of course, some things need to change and we need to improve. We're going to look back and see what that is. I don't have all the answers at the moment," Pulisic said.
