Hercules Gomez took aim at USMNT captain Tim Ream after the Stars and Stripes were thrashed by Belgium on Saturday, and now it is head coach Mauricio Pochettino who finds himself in the firing line after Tuesday’s loss to Portugal.

Having ended 2025 on a high with four wins and a draw from their final five games, the USMNT’s World Cup 2026 preparations have not started well, with back-to-back defeats against admittedly challenging opposition.

Gomez questions Pochettino’s approach

Given those circumstances, Gomez has blasted Pochettino’s approach in those games, expressing his astonishment that the Argentine is still experimenting with tactics and team selection against top-quality opponents with less than three months to go until the World Cup begins.

“Mauricio, you need to realize you’re playing against top 10 teams,” Gomez began. “Here comes real opposition and what you want to do is tinker, all of a sudden experiment. What you want to do is go toe-to-toe with a team like Belgium? You need to realize who you’re playing against.

“If this was a World Cup, would you play Belgium that way?” The former attacker asked. “I hope not, I hope you would be pragmatic. I hope you wouldn’t leave yourself so exposed that you get five, and it could’ve been eight.”

Concerns over USMNT experimentation

It was not only the Belgium loss Gomez was deeply unhappy with, the 43-year-old listing a number of issues he sees with what Pochettino and the USMNT did on the field in Tuesday’s defeat to Portugal.

“Then in the very next game, your last game before an actual World Cup roster announcement, you say ‘Christian Pulisic is going to be my 9, I’ll play with no nominal 9. The goalkeeper I left the door open to, Matt Freese, and benched him for Matt Turner, go back in the game now? Let me play two guys in central midfield that have played together a total of one time, a centre-back duo that’s never played together. My left-back has two games in 500 days with the USMNT’”.

“It feels like time wasted”

Gomez’s frustration was clear as he contemplated where the United States stand before World Cup 2026, particularly in comparison to how they shaped up for the same tournament four years ago in Qatar.

“It feels like time wasted,” Gomez opined. “In 2022 we felt very good about the USMNT because they were the second youngest team in the World Cup in Qatar. You said, ‘this is something to build on, there will be fruit to bear here.’

“Greg Berhalter, the federation, they had their drama, and then he comes back..Copa América is a failure, in comes Mauricio Pochettino, and it feels like four years have gone down the drain because you’re still trying to solidify a starting eleven. You’re still trying to solidify tactics.”

Two more games before World Cup 2026

Pochettino will have two more warm-up games to “solidify” things ahead of the USMNT’s first game at the World Cup, which will see them face Paraguay in Los Angeles on June 12. The United States will finalize their preparations with games against Senegal (May 31 in Charlotte) and Germany (June 6 in Chicago).

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