Mauricio Pochettino spent much of 2025 disassembling and re-assembling the U.S. men’s national team. He sensed a need to re-wire mindsets. To do that, “we started to destroy the things that we need to destroy,” he said, and to do that, he had to unwind a tight-knit group of players; he had to open doors to new members. He called more than 60 in total to six distinct training camps throughout the calendar year. He played 56 of them in games. He closed the year by attacking the concept that any of the 56 were “regulars.”
For his first camp of 2026, though, and for the first time, he will convene his re-assembled core.
The roster he announced Tuesday is the clearest indication yet of how he views his player pool after a year of experimenting and rebuilding, and with the World Cup near.
It’s also evidence that the experiments, though still ongoing, bore fruit. The 27 players called to Atlanta for a week of training, then friendlies against Belgium and Portugal, are a mix of established stars and relative newcomers whom Pochettino elevated over the past year.
Together, they are Pochettino’s core. The new core.
Players like Alex Freeman and Max Arfsten, despite uninspiring starts to 2026, are parts of it.
Players like Yunus Musah and Josh Sargent, two 2022 World Cup starters, aren’t.
Players like Johnny Cardoso and Gio Reyna? To be determined. Construction is still in progress. The March roster is not quite the World Cup roster — especially with Tyler Adams, Sergiño Dest, Haji Wright and Diego Luna absent due to injuries and fitness. The door, Pochettino said Tuesday, is “not closed. It’s open. It’s still open. It’s not the final roster.”
But it’s probably pretty close.
The vast majority of Pochettino’s selections, for the first time in a year, felt predictable. There are still battles on the roster bubble — for the third goalkeeper spot, and the fourth or fifth center back spot, and in a few other areas — but most of the 20-ish players who’ll matter this summer have emerged.
In many cases, their places in the USMNT were never realistically in question. Eight members of Pochettino’s apparent core — Adams, Christian Pulisic, Weston McKennie, Folarin Balogun, Tim Weah, Antonee Robinson, Chris Richards and Tim Ream — were part of previous coach Gregg Berhalter’s core, and started every match of the 2024 Copa América save for Weah after his red card. Dest is a ninth if healthy. All should be heavily involved this summer.
Then there is a second group, Poch’s guys, players who’ve earned the boss’s trust over the past 18 months — and especially over the past 10 months. They’re Matt Freese and Malik Tillman, Freeman and Arfsten, Tanner Tessmann and Cristian Roldan. Sebastian Berhalter might belong in the same category.
Toss in Brenden Aaronson and Ricardo Pepi — bench options for the previous coach and the current one — plus Mark McKenzie and Miles Robinson, and poof: most of the roster suddenly seems settled.
How do we know?
Well, just examine this March squad alongside Pochettino’s November squad.
Weston McKennie is back in USMNT camp for the first time since October 2025. (John McGloughlin / Icon Sportswire / Getty Images)
There are 17 holdovers. And of the 10 additions this month, six are so-called “regulars” who were held out in November for fitness reasons or club considerations — Pulisic, McKennie, Weah, Antonee Robinson, Richards and Tillman.
That makes 23 players, not including Adams or Dest, who are either in Pochettino’s plans or in strong consideration. (A World Cup plane seats 26.)
There are, potentially, exceptions. Reyna is surely one. He, Joe Scally, Auston Trusty and Aidan Morris are among the holdovers from November, but they hadn’t been part of the three previous camps. They still have plenty to prove this month. So do Cardoso and Patrick Agyemang, two players whose club form earned them recalls despite not playing for the USMNT since last summer.
It’s clear, however, how much Pochettino liked his November group. “October and November were a very good example — maybe with different roster, different names, but the team performed,” he said Tuesday.
His goal, come May, will be to pick 26 players who can come “very, very close to perform[ing] in the way that we performed in the last two camps,” he indicated.
And the safest way to do that, of course, is to pick the same players, with several other talented ones sprinkled in.
That, essentially, is what Pochettino did this week. Because the time for experimentation is (almost) over. The teardown happened, and now feels distant; the rebuild is (almost) complete. The late-March friendlies against Belgium and Portugal “are World Cup games,” Pochettino said, or at least he wants the USMNT to treat them as such. So he treated his roster selection similarly.
He insisted, as he has all along, that the roster’s door is “still open.” But his tone on Tuesday sounded different. Next week, he said, it will be “important to see the combination of different names, to see how we work, how we can create the same dynamic that [there was] in the last few camps.”
And if they do that?
This, plus Adams and Dest, with a few adjustments on the fringes (Wright? Luna?), should be the group that Pochettino rides into the World Cup spotlight.
