Road to the World Cup: USA’s Mauricio Pochettino Lauds ‘Hero’ Marcelo Bielsa
TAMPA, Fla. — Mauricio Pochettino’s history with Marcelo Bielsa goes way back, and it begins with a late-night visit.
As he detailed to SkySports in 2019, Pochettino was a 13-year-old boy sound asleep in his bed in the tiny town of Murphy, Argentina, when Bielsa, barely 30 years old at the time, was led into the youngster’s room by Héctor Pochettino, Mauricio’s father.
As the reserve team manager for historic Argentinian club Newell’s Old Boys, Bielsa was then just at the start of what has since become one of the most influential coaching careers in soccer history. And he wanted to see the dozing youngster’s legs.
Sufficiently impressed, the man who would be dubbed El Loco, loosely translated as “the crazy one,” decided to give the young center-back a shot. Three years later, the club signed the future U.S. national team coach to his first professional contract.
Back then, in the mid-1980s, neither Bielsa nor Pochettino could have possibly imagined that, four decades later, they’d meet as opposing managers when the USMNT takes on Bielsa’s Uruguay on Tuesday at Raymond James Stadium, home of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
“He’s a person that was really important in my young (days) when I started to play football, when I was 13-year-old, 14-year-old,” Pochettino told reporters a day before the contest between FIFA’s 16th ranked Americans and the No. 15 Celeste. “My admiration and my respect is massive. I cannot consider him like a friend. I cannot consider him like another normal person. It’s bigger respect. No, I speak with him like a man that you admire, your hero, this type of person that you wait for him to say hello, and then you say hello. It’s massive, my respect.”
Pochettino went on to star for Newell’s, the club where Lionel Messi trained as a youth player, and where fellow World Cup-winning Albiceleste icon Diego Armando Maradona spent a season a few years before retiring. Pochettino then embarked on a European playing career that took him to Espanyol in Spain and Paris Saint-Germain and Bordeaux in France, plus a starting role — under El Loco — for his national team at the 2002 World Cup.
Mauricio Pochettino, standing left with the ponytail, was coached by Marcelo Bielsa, at the 2002 World Cup. (DANIEL GARCIA/AFP via Getty Images)
As sterling a résumé as that is, Pochettino really made his name as a manager, winning a trophy with Espanyol — the other club in the city of Barcelona — and then taking perennially underachieving London outfit Tottenham to an unlikely UEFA Champions League final appearance in 2019, followed by league and cup titles with PSG.
It was Bielsa whose footsteps he wanted to follow in.
After taking over Newell’s in 1990, El Loco embarked on one of the most remarkable coaching journeys of all time. He left his native country to lead clubs in Mexico (Atlas, Club America) and Spain (Espanyol) — where he became Pochettino’s boss once again. He got the Argentina job after that — coaching Pochettino for a third time — before taking over Chile’s national team.
Club stops in France and Spain followed. Despite not speaking a word of English (or simply refusing to — nobody is really sure), he became a cult hero at Leeds United when he led the English club back to the Premier League after the better part of two decades languishing in the rough and tumble lower divisions.
Bielsa also had an indirect but no less consequential impact on Pochettino getting the U.S. job. Had his Uruguay squad not eliminated the host U.S. from the 2024 Copa América in the group stage finale of that event, Gregg Berhalter might very well still be at the Americans’ helm instead.
Tuesday will actually mark the second reunion between mentor and mentee on the sideline. They first faced off more than 14 years ago, when Bielsa’s Athletic Bilbao and Pochettino’s Espanyol contested a La Liga match in 2011. For two men so inextricably linked, perhaps another somewhere down the line was inevitable.
“I appreciate and admire and love him,” Pochettino said. “He was key in my career as a player, a key to loving the game. He inspired me to keep pushing, trying to be a coach. Yes, [Tuesday] for me is to enjoy, to be with him.
“And at the same time,” he added, acknowledging that Biesla’s Uruguay will pose a major challenge for him and his Americans, “We are going to suffer.”
Doug McIntyre is a soccer reporter for FOX Sports who has covered United States men’s and women’s national teams at FIFA World Cups on five continents. Follow him @ByDougMcIntyre.
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