Herculez Gomez landed in Italy off a flight in the summer of 2014 and found a voicemail from Jurgen Klinsmann waiting for him — two and a half minutes long — thanking him personally for his contributions to the program and letting him know he would not be going to the World Cup. Gomez had not played for the national team in over a year at that point, his knee was done, and by any reasonable measure, the call was a formality.
“He felt the need, the professionalism, to let me know that I’m not going,” Gomez said. “It meant the world to me.”
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That voicemail came to mind this week when reports emerged that Mauricio Pochettino’s staff had notified the players who were cut via email. Pochettino announced his 26-man World Cup roster Tuesday at a live event at Pier 17 in New York City, with the cuts including Diego Luna, Tanner Tessmann, and Aidan Morris, all of whom had represented the United States within the past year. Luna had become the living embodiment of everything Pochettino said he wanted from this program. He was one of the three most capped players of Pochettino’s entire tenure. US Soccer used Luna to sell the vision of what this team was supposed to be, and when they were done with him, they sent him an email.
“It’s inexcusable,” Gomez said. “For Diego Luna to be one of the top three most capped players under Mauricio Pochettino and to find out via email — that’s just wrong. You use him in World Cup commercials where he’s playing in a World Cup final. You use him in sporting-brand commercials; you use him to highlight your league and the national teams tied to it. That is wrong.”
The standard Gomez is pointing to did not start with him. In 2010, Bob Bradley’s staff was on the phone at 2 a.m., delivering the news to players who had spent years earning a spot on that roster, and Gomez remembered passing teammates in the hallway, tears streaming down their faces after being told face-to-face they were not going to South Africa. Four years later, Klinsmann was dragged through the press for telling Landon Donovan — the most decorated American soccer player of his generation — directly to his face that he was cut from the 2014 squad. The criticism was that Klinsmann was too harsh, too willing to deliver a brutal verdict without softening it. Nobody accused him of hiding behind a screen.
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“You have the accountability, and you have the professionalism to tell a player to his face,” Gomez said. “So when I read that they were informed that they weren’t going via email, this just may be a stop for Mauricio Pochettino, and that’s maybe the way he’s treating it. But to these players, you’re ending a dream. You’re ending something they’ve been working for their whole life with an email, and they deserve more.”
Pochettino has rebuilt this program — or at least attempted to — from the ruins of the Berhalter era, and his roster decisions are his to make. But Bradley and Klinsmann — coaches who were criticized for plenty — at least understood the basic obligation of looking a player in the eye when you ended his dream. With the World Cup being played on American soil for the first time since 1994, you would think their successor could manage the same.
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