If Mauricio Pochettino moves to the United States to become manager of the U.S. men's national team, he will be forced to adapt.
Atlanta, Georgia, the future headquarters and training center for U.S. Soccer, is a far cry from Barcelona, Paris or London. Atlanta is a cosmopolitan city in most eyes, but it seems to have lost some of the old-world charm of some of the cities where Pochettino once served.
Maybe he'll decorate his office to evoke the atmosphere of those places: a photo of his former roommate and Newell's Old Boys team-mate Diego Maradona might hang on one wall, maybe a shirt from his time at Paris Saint-Germain or even one from his time at La Liga's Espanyol, the club that most developed him.
And, of course, there are lemons.
You see, in some ways at least, Pochettino is already uniquely prepared for life in America.
The 52-year-old Argentine is a bit obsessed with the sort of motivational techniques and almost supernatural beliefs that many Americans seem to be obsessed with.
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If you have insomnia, you've seen the late-night TV adverts. Pochettino talks about aura, self-determination and courage. He makes you walk on hot coals and pins you against a wall with an arrow to your throat. Spend any length of time with him and you might lose faith.
And there are flaws. Once Pochettino is settled, walk into his office in Atlanta and you're sure to find them.
“An Argentinian friend of mine told me that lemons absorb bad energy and purify the air,” Pochettino wrote in Brave New World, a book documenting his five years as manager of London-based Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur. “So I keep a tray of lemons in my office.”
“We all have the potential to see the energy that surrounds things and people, but not everyone has developed that sense. Somehow, I was able to develop the ability to see the auras of others.”
In fact, Brave New World, a 267-page snappy read created in collaboration with Spanish author and journalist Guillem Balague, is packed with motivational buzzwords. Search for the word “brave” and you'll find various versions of the word used 18 times; “energy” 40 times, “aura” six times; and lemons are mentioned, well, just once.
(Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Pochettino is renowned for preparing his team thoroughly for matches, both tactically and in terms of fitness, but just as important is his belief in motivation and trust in his players. These beliefs underpin everything Pochettino does as a manager – and in a way, many of these beliefs were shaped with the help of Zesco Espar.
Espar first met Pochettino in the mid-2000s, when the Argentine was finishing up his playing career with Espanyol. The two got back in touch a few years later, when Pochettino took over as manager of Barcelona amid a fierce La Liga relegation battle. Pochettino had read Espar's book, “Play from the Heart,” and felt it was very similar to his own philosophy. Espar, a former handball player and coach who led FC Barcelona's handball team to the European Championship, was happy to cooperate.
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A few years later, Espar remembers his friend's frustration when Pochettino was appointed manager of promising Southampton midway through the 2012-13 Premier League season.
“The first time I spoke to him (after he arrived), he said, 'These guys are a lot better than we think they are,'” Espal said. “'We need to do something to help them understand that.'”
Espar and Pochettino derived their solution from corporate training in the United States.
The following pre-season saw the team travel to Espar's home base in Spain for a few days of seminars and motivational talks. Afterwards, everyone filed out to find a pile of hot coals in front of them. Pochettino was the first to step forward, calmly crossing the coals without hesitation. Rookie midfielder Victor Wanyama, now with CF Montreal, struggled, as did 31-year-old striker Rickie Lambert, who approached with obvious hesitation. Eventually, urged on by his teammates and by Pochettino himself, everyone walked over the coals.
“It was just a metaphor for breaking his belief in himself and his abilities,” Espal says. “And they had a great season. They quickly escaped (relegation) (and finished eighth in the 20-club English top flight, Southampton's highest position for 11 years). He trusts his players. That's one of his main traits.”
Pochettino used motivational techniques on his Southampton players (AMA/Corbis via Getty Images)
Esper learned the hot coal trick from Tony Robbins, America's leading authority on self-help and motivation techniques, and Pochettino has his players try something a little more terrifying: putting the shaft of an arrow against the soft tissue around their neck and then leaning against a board until the arrow breaks.
But his motivational beliefs go far beyond Robins-inspired team-building exercises: He believes in the power of handshakes. At Spurs, Pochettino required his players to shake hands each morning as they entered the team cafeteria, and asked them to do the same for each other.
“When you touch a person, you feel their energy,” Pochettino once said in a podcast appearance. “You feel if they're doing good, if they need love, if they're upset, if they're sleeping well. And then you get a lot of information that's very important for management. You're not managing a robot, you're managing a human being who wants the best, who wants to do his best to achieve everything he wants.”
At Tottenham the mandatory handshakes were merely a bonding exercise, but for Pochettino it may have been something more. The Argentine coach relies on sports scientists and analysts for performance data but from direct contact with his players he gauges another metric: their aura.
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“I believe that nothing happens by chance,” Pochettino wrote in Brave New World. “Everything happens for a reason.
“Ever since I was a little girl, I had the ability to sense something powerful that is invisible but certainly exists: the life force, the energy field that runs the world, the aura that accompanies people and gives so much information about them. It's in my skin, I feel it. (My wife) Karina and I call this 'cosmic energy'. My wife has helped me understand it and go deeper into it. Others have helped me explore those sensations further. It's not superstition or black magic. I believe there is science behind it.”
American soccer fans are no strangers to cheating to build and motivate teams.
Former US men's national team coach Jurgen Klinsmann is German, but he had spent the previous 13 years in California when he took over in 2011, so he was as close to a native Californian as you could get. As a result, many of Klinsmann's comments about players and his coaching philosophy often felt saturated with West Coast self-help jargon.
If Pochettino's brutal rebuke was like a scene from The Office, Klinsmann took it a step further, showing his players a 55-year-old man in a tracksuit ripping up several phone books and breaking a frying pan in half.
Recently, U.S. men's national team legend Tim Howard spoke about Klinsmann's approach, and he didn't hold back.
“I can't remember a time when there was as much of a gulf between players and managers as there was under Jurgen,” former goalkeeper Howard wrote in Britain's Daily Mail newspaper. “He organised lots of team outings. He was great at trash talk and philosophical rhetoric, but there was no football involved.”
That's not the case with Pochettino, of course. He has a rich coaching background and is renowned not just for managing personnel but for managing the game itself. “He also uses very advanced analytical techniques,” Espar adds. “He's not just a 'motivation guru'. He has a strong playbook, a strong model and methodology for matches, training and physical conditioning. It's not just motivation.”
The Argentine coach gives clear instructions to his players about positioning and micromanaging that aspect of the game as well as building play from the back. He also places a great deal of importance on trust and relationship building. Pochettino is famous for not fining players for minor infractions and never enters the training facility's dressing rooms. In many ways, the manager leaves much of the leadership responsibility to the players themselves.
“He balances leadership with management,” Espal says. “Management is speaking to the player's head, leadership is speaking to the player's heart. He's very good at balancing that. He has a great training structure with practice, assistants, all that work. And he trusts his players more than most coaches. He empowers them. He recognizes them, but he also gives them responsibility.”
“For both of us, the difference between a championship team and a multiple champion team is who is responsible. In a championship team, the coach is responsible. But in a multiple champion team, the players are responsible for each other. That's one of Pochettino's main philosophies. He sees his players as better than what they already have.”
But let's not forget the lemons.
Because even after all of this effort, building a deep well of knowledge and crafting his own vision for his team, Pochettino is still relying on at least a little citrus to help rebuild his squad.
The U.S. national team is currently in a slump after being eliminated from the Copa America this summer on home soil and is looking to bounce back ahead of the 2026 World Cup, which they will co-host with Canada and Mexico. If Pochettino has anything to say about that, LeMond will likely be involved.
“They started working after two years at Tottenham,” he said during his time at Tottenham's London rivals Chelsea last season. “Let's give Lemon time, that's what we all believe… They need a long time, they don't have magic powers, but more than ever, I believe in them.”
(Top photo: Sebastian Frej/MB Media/Getty; additional photos by iStock; design by Dan Goldfarb)
