Mauricio Pochettino‘s salary — both upon his initial signing in September 2024 and his contract extension this August — was subsidized by “philanthropic gifts.”
U.S. Soccer stated when Pochettino re-signed, “This appointment and broader investment in the U.S. men’s national team program is being supported in significant part by a philanthropic leadership gift from Kenneth C. Griffin, Founder and CEO of Citadel and Founder of Griffin Catalyst. Additional support has been provided by Scott Goodwin, Adam Freede, and several commercial partners.”
Freede is the CEO and co-founder of MadaLuxe Group, a global luxury distribution platform, and an LAFC co-owner. Goodwin, like Griffin, is a hedge-fund manager.
Manchester United is reportedly paying U.S. Soccer $10 million to trigger Pochettino’s buyout clause and $2 million for his assistants.
At Friday morning’s press conference at the U.S. Soccer’s National Training Center announcing Pochettino’s move to Manchester United, U.S. Soccer CEO JT Batson was asked whether the buyout payments would go back to the benefactors who subsidized Pochettino’s salary and whether the federation would use outside funding to pay its next USMNT coach. Batson said:
“So the agreement with Manchester United — you all know, U.S. Soccer is a nonprofit — those funds are used to help us hire great coaches, help us fund youth national team programs, coaching education — we have a referee training camp going on in a room around the corner … So those funds are available for us to invest to make the biggest impact on our goals. And to question I know folks have: our supporters, our sponsors, our donors, our fans are very supportive around making sure we have the resources to achieve our goals and have world-class coaches. We’re appreciative of that support and we look forward to that being a key part of our way of winning going forward.”
📖 Meet Ken Griffin: The hedge-fund billionaire who helps pay Pochettino
Translation: that $10 mil is all ours, baby!
It isn’t like they aren’t going to hire a new coach.
or not, remember when everyone’s fav economist had $100m in the bank that was idle for over a decade? Stating the obvious is all, the funds have to go to USSF and USSF is a 501c3.
The quote by Batson as the last paragraph should tell you everything where this guys head is at. Throwing MONEY/ INVESTMENT is NOT the answer to our soccer problem…Our problem is that we’re creating STIFFS, ROBOTS, mostly due to our great but useless licensed coaches ,who themselves , lack a creative bone in their body…. But I”m sure with more money and investment we’ll fix this problem by hiring more useless licensed coaches by hiring and paying them more money….
“Those funds will help us hire great coaches”, REALLY??? Was it a great coach that created a Johan Cruyff??? or was it that he spend hours upon hours as a kid playing pickup, spending only 4hours per week at Ajax and the rest on the streets, which taught him so much more about the game. Or how ’bout’ Messi , Maradona, Zlatan, Zidane, etc, and many other greats…Notice that nowhere in their autobiographies, they ever mentioned a particular coach, or a ‘WORLD CLASS coach as mentioned by Batson, that made these players so great …..NO, instead it was hard work playing, playing, playing…There were NEVER any coaches when they were developing ON THEIR OWN playing PICKUP…..
How about more MONEY on “COACHING EDUCATION”. Yeah, that should do it…OPEN YOUR WALLETS!!! to contribute to coaching education. Have more idiots become licensed coaches and teach all about team systems , team organization, programmed to do what you want them to do..Keep going with this and all our boys will begin to play and look like those little puppets stuck on a steel rod called ‘table fussball’ .
You can tell we the wrong people running the show who have no feel for this game….