When the players of the United States men’s national team are introduced to Mauricio Pochettino, they will meet a coach the likes of which the United States has never had in its history.

Pochettino, who was officially appointed on Tuesday, has had an impressive career as a coach, coaching some of the biggest clubs and players in European soccer. He has never worked in the U.S. soccer system before. His profile is enormous, but his working style will be unfamiliar. The desire to find out what the new boss is like will likely permeate the players’ first interactions, right down to the first handshake.

Pochettino will also be trying to learn something at this very moment.

“When you touch some people, you feel the energy,” he said on the High Performance Podcast in 2020, describing how he gets a first sense of his players’ mental state just by shaking hands. “You can feel if they’re OK, if they need love, if they’re upset, if they’re sleeping well… you can have a lot of information that’s so important to manage (them)… Negative, positive, you can feel anything. I think we all have the ability to feel… that’s the moment to make a connection.”

As a new manager, Pochettino walks into a room with a kaleidoscope of emotions, including the dismal performance at this summer’s Copa América that cost Gregg Berhalter his job. With a handshake, Pochettino might sense the emotions that come with the pressure to live up to high expectations (Christian Pulisic), or the struggle to recover from injury (Tyler Adams), or the desire to put a turbulent few years as a professional behind them (Gio Reyna). Each player has their own story, motivations and feelings, and Pochettino will have to process these for a long time before he picks his first starting XI and starts considering how that team will actually play.

“Philosophy, methodology, football style, these different ideas are not important,” Pochettino said in this podcast. “The players have to trust you. Day after day – that’s the only way (to build that trust).”

Pochettino now hopes to prove his 2020 self wrong; his success as a US coach is based on building trust without this daily contact and in a completely unfamiliar context.

For all his great work at club level, Pochettino has never been a national team coach and therefore has never managed a group without the daily interactions he values ​​so much. To date, he has only coached one player who is currently on the US team’s radar (centre-back Cameron Carter-Vickers in his early days at Tottenham). The wider talent pool still offers plenty of potential, but Pochettino will be limited in his ability to help players reach that potential.

He must keep all of this in mind with one ambitious end goal in mind: ensuring the Americans have a great performance at the 2026 World Cup (whatever that means) and change the sport across the country in the process (whatever that means). He is being asked to do this because he is the first Latino and first native Spanish-speaker ever to hold the position—a remarkable fact considering how much of the country’s soccer culture has been shaped by those groups.

By comparison, managing the personal motivations of U.S. players is a piece of cake. Pochettino has guided players from around the world to clubs that have to make the most of what they have (Espanyol and Southampton), a club with a little more financial heft (Tottenham), and two financial giants brimming with world-class talent (Paris Saint-Germain and Chelsea). The expectations of those clubs may be completely different, but in each case, Pochettino has been able to achieve varying degrees of success methodically, elevating the performance of young players and ensuring that the entire group adopts his tactics over time.

Tactics, at least, is one area where Pochettino won’t have to break much new ground for the U.S. Like his predecessor Gregg Berhalter, Pochettino almost always plays with a back four, encourages his teams to play out of defense and values ​​possession as a way to keep the opposition off balance. Both coaches encourage their full-backs to push far forward and join in the attack, and Pochettino will have some interesting pieces to do that with left-back Antonee Robinson and, when healthy, right-back Sergiño Dest (albeit without much depth behind them). The finer points of how these things are implemented differ from coach to coach, but the wheel is unlikely to be reinvented.

The biggest difference between the coaches, aside from their level of experience, is their closeness to the players. Berhalter raised the current generation of Americans from a young age and has been something of a father figure to their development. Pochettino, on the other hand, has no such problems. His teams have to gel together. His players have to play intensely with and without the ball. If they don’t, they won’t play – no matter what he thinks of their handshake.

Adams said in a recent interview that the USA needed a “ruthless” coach. In Pochettino they have one who has more scope than any of his predecessors to be just that.

But first he has to build trust.