Pochettino to honour USA duties as Manchester United wait for new manager

Mauricio Pochettino will see out the current international break with the United States men’s national team despite a £7 million agreement being struck with Manchester United, leaving the Premier League club without a head coach when their players return from scheduled time off.

According to The Athletic, Pochettino gave no indication of his impending departure when he addressed players and staff at the start of training, focusing instead on the day’s session and the three Under-20 players who had joined the group. The USA face Haiti twice in the Concacaf Nations League — first in Miami on Saturday, then in Cincinnati on Tuesday — with both matches played on American soil after Haiti’s home fixture was relocated for security reasons.

Defender Chris Richards confirmed the camp had absorbed the news calmly. “It’s kinda been business as usual here,” he said. “We’ve just kept our head down. We’re training and playing like we don’t hear anything. We’re training like he’s going to be the coach tomorrow, because we don’t know what’s gonna happen or what’s not gonna happen. If you focus too much on what could happen, you won’t be able to really focus on what is happening.”

US Soccer has no straightforward mechanism to replace Pochettino at such short notice, and forcing him and his long-time assistant Jesús Pérez to leave immediately upon agreeing buyout terms would place the federation in a very difficult position.

The situation is an awkward one for United, who have known for weeks that incumbent manager Michael Carrick’s position was untenable. Carrick has yet to be formally dismissed, yet his departure is widely understood to be imminent. The club now face the prospect of having no head coach in place to greet players when the international break ends — a window that is typically used by clubs in transition to give a new manager maximum preparation time.

The delay is largely of United’s own making. Having been slow to act on Carrick’s position despite deteriorating results and performances, the club find themselves in a race against the calendar, with the international break — usually an asset in a managerial change — offering diminishing returns the longer the process takes.