Lisi Niesner/Reuters US Sports Picture Service
United States men’s national soccer team coach Mauricio Pochettino‘s career as a player and coach has taken him all over the world, with stops in Argentina, Spain, France, England, and the United States. That experience has given him a unique insight into various sporting cultures, including America’s.
After guiding the USMNT to perhaps their most impressive win in modern World Cup history with its dominant 4-1 win over Paraguay in their opening group stage match, Mauricio Pochettino was perhaps feeling himself quite a bit, as he gave a refreshingly honest interview with El Pais in which he declared that “American sports rewards losers.”
USMNT head coach Mauricio Pochettino details how he believes that American sports “rewards losers”
“Their culture is playful. They want to play. We told them, ‘Guys, playing soccer is one thing, competing is another.’ They’re two completely different sports. They grow up in a culture of playing. Why? If you start in MLS and you haven’t won a game in three months and you’re at the bottom, what’s the consequence if there’s no promotion or relegation, no international competition?” Pochettino said.
“American sports reward losers! But soccer is different: if you reward those who don’t win… If you don’t have goals, you don’t fight. If I lose, what happens? Nothing. They just fire the coach. Also, the American player is disciplined. But with a sense of complacency that isn’t good in soccer. It took us a year and a half to change that mentality.”
Pochettino’s opinion of American sporting culture has likely been formed by a few factors. Most famously, Neither MLS nor any other professional sports league has a relegation. Relegation is arguably the driving force in global soccer as it punishes teams that don’t perform well by sending them down to a lower league, while also rewarding those in the lower leagues with promotions for consistent winning.
There’s also the system of the losingest teams in the various American sports leagues getting high draft picks (although the NBA does have a much-maligned lottery system in place). That structure has created a philosophy known as “tanking,” in which franchises will intentionally lose in order to secure a more valuable draft pick in the subsequent offseason.