Why the USMNT Will Have the Best Coach at the 2026 World Cup

I wrote about how hiring Mauricio Pochettino was the best-possible-case scenario for US Soccer — and why it still might not work out:

Having a great international manager is no guarantee for great results. Luis Enrique has been incredibly successful both at Barcelona and PSG, but his Spain team was eliminated from the 2022 World Cup by Morocco in the round of 16. Luciano Spalletti led a brilliant 2022-23 Napoli team to its first Serie A title since Diego Maradona was playing for the club, but his Italy team was awful at the Euros this past summer.

Conversely, here's a list of the coaches who have won a World Cup, Euro or Copa America since 2014: Jogi Low, Fernando Santos, Jorge Sampaoli, Didier Deschamps, Tite, Roberto Mancini, Lionel Scaloni and Luis De La Fuente. These are coaches who either washed out of the highest club levels of Europe, are federation/national team lifers, or guys who never coached outside their own domestic leagues.

And some other stuff:

-I tried to see if there’s any season-long information we can pull from the first three games of the Premier League season. There is — and it’s good news for Liverpool, bad news for Everton.

-I ranked the 30 most-expensive transfers of the summer based on how they’re likely to look a year from now.

-I wrote about all of the major moves and non-moves for key members of the USMNT.

-And I was on ESPN FC Live today with Mark Donaldson, Mark Ogden, and Stevie Nicol to chat about the Pochettino hire and normal stuff like ensemble models and r-squared:

Happy Wednesday, all.