After a decade of dancing around one another, Manchester United are finalising a deal to make Mauricio Pochettino their head coach.
What can fans expect? Amid United’s managerial merry-go-round, it’s easy to lose track. The good news is that Pochettino has an extensive CV to examine, and our reporters have covered his spells at Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur and the United States men’s national team in depth for years.
So we have drafted in Dan Kilpatrick, who covered Spurs when Pochettino was in charge, Chelsea writer Liam Twomey and USMNT expert Paul Tenorio to tell us about their experiences of the Argentinian, what he could bring to Old Trafford and where the stumbling blocks could be…
What’s your initial reaction to Manchester United going for Pochettino?
Kilpatrick: I’m not surprised because it feels like it’s been a long time coming. The Spurs fan in me is gutted because him getting another top-level job reduces the chance of any potential reunion.
He’s a great manager, but he keeps taking basket-case clubs. His most stable job since he left Tottenham in 2019 is the United States national team. He took Paris Saint-Germain at the wrong time, he took Chelsea at the wrong time and he’s taken United at a tough time.
Despite his brilliance, he’s taking another job that is almost unmanageable because of the owners.
Twomey: That I’ve gone back in time? Pochettino and United have been dancing around each other for many years.
Now his managerial stock is at a very different level, and he’s at a different stage of his career. But it’s still an intriguing option — and it could still be a very successful one.
Tenorio: It makes sense in that he is a manager who’s had experience at big jobs. United are looking for someone who can handle pressure in a stressful environment and has been there before. I wasn’t really surprised. As soon as I saw things going sour early in the season, I thought, ‘OK, there’s an inevitability here’.
What were the biggest strengths and weaknesses he showed on your patch?
Kilpatrick: He was a miracle worker at Tottenham. He operated on a shoestring budget to consistently punch above his weight and he was the ultimate firefighter. He smoothed over every crisis, almost turning them into positives.
He was working in really tough conditions when Spurs were building a new stadium. The chairman, Daniel Levy, didn’t have such a close eye on football. But Pochettino led Spurs to their best two Premier League finishes, kept them in a title race and reached a Champions League final.
What could he have done if he was properly backed?
In terms of weaknesses, he occasionally showed a lack of ruthlessness. He didn’t really care about the domestic cups, telling reporters at a press conference in 2017 that he preferred to prioritise “real trophies”. That frustrated people associated with the club who thought, ‘This club needs to win anything’.
Twomey: The best thing about Pochettino at Chelsea was how he gave a platform to young players, such as Cole Palmer and Nicolas Jackson. He goes to great lengths to create a positive environment for his players, especially attackers.
As for the bad, there were player discipline issues, which have been a broader problem at Chelsea but were particularly glaring under Pochettino. But the single biggest issue was the ferocious pressing he demanded. When the closing down worked, Chelsea smothered teams and created good chances. But when that press was beaten, they were wide open and they ended up conceding 63 league goals — only West Ham United (74) conceded more of the top-half teams in the 2023-24 season.
Tenorio: His biggest strength has been his commitment to his culture and his ability to diagnose the atmosphere at U.S. Soccer. After three or four camps, he had a very strong grasp of where the culture was wrong and what he had to do to correct it. His experience working with big players means he has no fear or deference. He aligned egos and created a strong group environment.
As for his weaknesses, he overcorrected based on his experience as a club coach and doesn’t communicate with his players outside of camp. He feels like that’s interfering with their profession, their lives and their jobs. I don’t think many international managers function that way anymore.
How did players and the dressing room respond to him?
Kilpatrick: They loved him. He was a father figure to a lot of the players. He transformed the culture at Tottenham very quickly. He realised Spurs weren’t going to win by spending more than their rivals, but he knew they could be a closer group and a more cohesive unit than their rivals.
His tactics and double sessions and fitness regimen were gruelling, but the ones with the right mentality — Harry Kane being the best example — responded well because they wanted to be pushed and improve.
Twomey: We always got the sense the Chelsea players liked Pochettino. Even the ones who weren’t playing regularly didn’t openly grumble about him. He was very arm-around-the-shoulder with his best players and they seemed to enjoy the experience of his management.
Tenorio: He does a fantastic job connecting with players and building belief in them. That was really important for the U.S. job because he built depth where there was none and got the most out of players with limited talent. By building belief in them, he lifted that talent to its maximum.
He has challenged the established stars, too. He’s capable of doing both.
What about how he interacts with executives above him?
Kilpatrick: No manager before or since had as strong a relationship with chairman Levy as Pochettino did. There’s even an extract from Pochettino’s book with Guillem Balague where he says he went whitewater rafting with Levy. But there was more than the occasional prickly moment. In the media, Pochettino wasn’t averse to a power play against the chairman, but both of them understood that that was part of the job.
He seemed to accept the limitations and parameters the club put on him in a way that his successors and predecessors haven’t.
Twomey: Pochettino came into the Chelsea job intending to work within the structure, but it was a problem through his one season in charge. His position felt awkward amid the unique ownership dynamic between Behdad Eghbali and Todd Boehly. It never seemed to be an easy relationship with the sporting leadership team either.
Pochettino is more of an old-fashioned English-style manager than a coach. He has a clearly defined idea of how he wants to play. When you look back at the peak of his career at Tottenham, he was much more powerful than just a coach. He’s not necessarily used to working with the kind of intermediate layer of football executives that has become the norm in the Premier League in recent years. And of course, that is just as present at Manchester United as it was at Chelsea.
So United and their executives will have to be confident that Pochettino is prepared to work with them and to collaborate with them. And it’s possible he could do that as long as he feels his views are respected and he has a voice in these conversations. Perhaps it could work, but it never really worked at Chelsea.
Tenorio: His personality is very collaborative, yet he also has clear boundaries on, ‘This is my duty, not your duty’. He has built strong relationships with leadership above him via that openness to share ideas and to walk people through his processes.
His assistant will be a critical figure — Jesus Perez serves, effectively, as his CEO and chief of staff. He handles the behind-the-scenes work. Often, he acts as a firewall, allowing Pochettino to focus on the task at hand: managing the team.
How enjoyable and attractive was his football?
Kilpatrick: It was brilliant to watch.
At its peak, they were one of the most exciting teams in the country, if not even in Premier League history. They went the 2016-17 Premier League season unbeaten at home, playing an exhilarating brand of pressing, front-footed football.
The game has moved on but it felt very modern. Pochettino had his players pressing, attacking and playing out from the back, a model he brought to England when he joined Southampton. He was at the cutting edge.
Twomey: They were really exciting when they had the ball, but it’s not fun to watch your team defend incompetently, as Chelsea often did under Pochettino, while making unforced errors. To some extent, you can put that on the Chelsea players, but Enzo Maresca got them to defend at a much higher level, albeit with a less exciting style of football. Some of their defensive struggles were baked into what Pochettino wanted to do.
Tenorio: He has an attacking mindset and that usually lends itself to playing a more attractive style, and that’s what American fans were most pleased with in the early stages of the World Cup.
He’s very adaptable. He arrived with the U.S. playing 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3, but quickly diagnosed that they didn’t have enough depth on the wings, or enough attackers who could take on opponents one-on-one. By the end, they were playing a hybrid back-three/back-four system to make the most of their wing-backs, where they did have depth.
Does he have the personality to handle the United job?
Kilpatrick: Absolutely. He loves the limelight — taking the USMNT job, he knew he would be the centre of the world for a whole month this summer.
He’s a very spiritual guy, a very romantic guy. He’ll love the allure of United as a big club and really lean into that. He’s an anecdotalist — he’ll love to tell stories about his own past and United’s past. He’ll really lean into Sir Alex Ferguson and the glamour and history of United.
His personality as a manager is a great fit: promoting young players, playing attacking football, wanting to win well and setting the culture. All these things would work for any club, but especially United, as they aspire to return to these high standards.
Twomey: Pochettino is a big enough character and has been around the English game for long enough. He had the strength of character to build Tottenham into something they hadn’t been since the 20th century.
His reputation has been punctured by how his career has gone since Tottenham, but he still has an aura, a charisma to carry players with him and build connections with fans.
Tenorio: No doubt. He likes the spotlight. He can get a little thorny when he’s sensitive to criticism. That might be hard in the Manchester United job, but he’s experienced it before. He’s worked in England and that is really important context.
It’s hard for the American audience to understand: it’s like an NFL job. Every single thing you do and every single thing you say is picked apart. He knows that, and he’s lived it — and I think he misses it. That part of him would be a strong fit for the job: understanding that you’re not just there to coach football, you’re also there to be the face of Manchester United and take the brunt of whatever comes.
One criticism is that he has not won trophies in England. Can he?
Kilpatrick: It’s absolute nonsense to say he’s not a winner. Operating on a shoestring budget with a management team above him that weren’t focused on football, he nearly delivered a league title and the Champions League. He worked miracles at Spurs.
There’s a really interesting parallel with Jurgen Klopp. They came to English football at a similar time, they both played a similar type of football but Klopp was backed by Liverpool and Pochettino wasn’t backed by Spurs. He could have comfortably won similar amounts of stuff to Klopp had he been backed the same way. If United can get their act together, he who can win trophies.
Twomey: He was hugely unlucky to not win trophies at Tottenham, and he did an exceptional job there regardless of his trophy record.
At Chelsea, he had a very embarrassing failure in the Carabao Cup final against a threadbare Liverpool. Chelsea created enough chances to win, so from a coaching perspective, you could say he did a good enough job, but maybe he didn’t do enough to keep his players composed on the big occasion.
United are so far away from that trophy-winning standard that you need someone who’s more than a coach, someone who can build a culture and build a club. And Pochettino has shown he can do that.
Tenorio: It’s not something they need to worry about right now at Manchester United, so that’s helpful. But he’s capable of delivering silverware.
What he did with Spurs is unprecedented, and he feels strongly that the project was going in the right direction at Chelsea and that, had he stayed for another season, they would have been on track.
He got Spurs beyond expectations, and that’s the job: can you meet or exceed expectations of the club you’re managing? Meeting or exceeding expectations this season means getting Manchester United into the top half of the table and building from there, and Pochettino can do that.
