Mauricio Pochettino has acknowledged that he wishes he had taken a greater role in the sequence of events that saw Folarin Balogun cleared to face Belgium at this summer’s World Cup, a situation the US men’s national team head coach believes ended up damaging his side.
Balogun had been sent off following a challenge on Bosnia and Herzegovina defender Tarik Muharemović, a dismissal that by rule carries a one-game suspension. His ban for the next fixture, against Belgium, was suspended after lobbying of Fifa by the US Soccer Federation and by US president Donald Trump, who said he personally called Fifa president Gianni Infantino to ask for the ruling to be reviewed. Infantino maintains that the decision to reinstate Balogun was taken independently by Fifa’s disciplinary committee.
Speaking to the broadcaster Andrés Cantor in a Spanish-language interview for Fútbol de Primera, Pochettino said he had no part in the decision but, with hindsight, would have preferred to have been closer to it. “Maybe I regret not having been more involved,” he said. “In the situation that later generated all of the negativity afterwards. Maybe I regret not having been more inside of that decision making process. I wasn’t involved in that decision, to overturn the red card. As a football person, I understand everything … Beyond whether we were right or not [about the call on the field], I think nobody understood how it happened.”
The affair overshadowed what had until then been a positive tournament for the United States. Belgium’s players and coaches said afterwards that it gave them extra motivation going into the match, and Balogun himself later spoke about feeling uncomfortable with the level of attention the episode placed on him.
Pochettino suggested the reaction around the Balogun ruling fed directly into the performance that followed. The US were beaten 4-1 by Belgium and eliminated in the last 16, outclassed in every phase of the game. “As a football person,” he said, “where many times we have that emotional intelligence – [we know] that energy can change things. I think that energy changed the minute that happened. And by then, the game is played under different parameters, and that match was never a match where I believe the tactics, strategy, or selection of players would have changed the course of what happened during the game.”
The coach also indicated that the group involved in the effort to get Balogun onto the pitch against Belgium may have been larger than he would have liked. “That’s something we’ve talked about internally,” Pochettino said. “I think that these types of things have to be managed under a much more limited structure, a structure where decisions have to be made by very few people, where very few people manage these types of things. [Those decisions] should be strictly sporting and common sense, beyond whether a rule or a committee can say one thing or another.”
Pochettino’s attention now turns back to the pitch. His USMNT side face Peru in Orlando on Saturday before meeting Chile, Mexico and Canada across the remainder of an extended international window.