U.S. Soccer restructures sporting department: What it means for Pochettino, Hayes

U.S. Soccer is restructuring its sporting department and moving away from a “sporting director” model in favor of one that will delineate between men’s and women’s soccer and formalize direct lines from Mauricio Pochettino and Emma Hayes to the top of the organization.

Rather than task a single soccer executive with overseeing all national teams, as was the case with former sporting director Matt Crocker, the federation will hire two new leaders: a “director of women’s and girls’ soccer” and a “director of men’s and boys’ soccer.”

The two new hires will oversee the pathways to the U.S. women’s and men’s national teams. Their work will span nearly the entire soccer ecosystem, from amateur clubs to youth national teams to professional leagues, according to job descriptions posted Tuesday.

But they will not oversee the USWNT or USMNT; those are in the hands of Hayes and Pochettino, the head coaches and two of the highest-paid employees in U.S. Soccer history. Hayes and Pochettino will have full control of the senior teams and report directly to CEO JT Batson. They’ll also have broad leeway to help shape player development and the wider landscape in partnership with the new “directors of soccer.”

In fact, Hayes and Pochettino “have helped shape this (director of soccer) role,” U.S. Soccer COO Dan Helfrich told The Athletic. Both coaches, Helfrich said, will also be “key collaborators” in deciding who to hire for the new positions, and they’ll speak regularly with the directors once aboard.

The new hires, on the other hand, will not be responsible for hiring and firing senior national team coaches, Helfrich confirmed. That responsibility is now officially his and Batson’s.

The directors, instead, will be adjacent to the WNT and MNT coaches. (Both will report to Helfrich.) The women’s and girls’ director, according to that job description, will work alongside Hayes and her staff, “ensuring that their insight and expertise are built into the pathway and that a female lens is applied to all dimensions of American soccer.”

The new structure represents a shift from the one that U.S. Soccer employed for most of the past decade. In the aftermath of the USMNT’s failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup, and after decades of coaching hires made by presidents and CEOs, the federation hired Earnie Stewart as its first-ever USMNT general manager. Stewart led the 2018 coaching search that landed on Gregg Berhalter.

A year later, Stewart was promoted to a newly created sporting director role and tasked with overseeing all U.S. national teams. When he left in 2023, the federation hired Crocker to replace him. Crocker led the recruitment of Hayes in 2023 and Pochettino in 2024, with Batson and U.S. Soccer president Cindy Parlow Cone also involved in both processes.

Crocker’s remit, though, was extremely broad. He oversaw youth national teams, crafted developmental philosophies, and traveled to board meetings and coaching conventions to evangelize “the U.S. Way,” a multifaceted soccer strategy that he played a significant role in shaping.

When Crocker left in April of 2026, Helfrich — who joined at the start of the year after a decades-long career at Deloitte — took on some of those responsibilities. He also worked with Batson and others to review the sporting structure, and it became “increasingly clear, in the months leading into the men’s World Cup and in the months after the men’s World Cup, that the breadth of our soccer mission is extraordinary,” too broad for a single executive to lead, Helfrich now says.

It “range(s) from how the sport is introduced to children at a young age, to how the system develops players, to how those players — as they get closer to national team ability — have their careers developed,” Helfrich explained. “And that has to happen within a men’s and women’s game that are quite different. As a result, we believe we need a team of leaders driving that totality of mission, not a single leader who — it would be impractical for a single leader to drive that entire agenda solo.”

The restructured “team of leaders,” therefore, will include Pochettino and Hayes, of course, but also head of talent ID Tony Lepore; the heads of youth national team development, Tracey Kevins and Barry Pauwels; and Oguchi Onyewu, the former USMNT defender and now assistant sporting director, who will continue in “a cross-federation executive role” helping all national teams and other initiatives, such as “how we better engage our alums,” Helfrich said.

Anna Lavis, the VP of soccer growth strategy, who has been leading the federation’s efforts to reform youth soccer, and others in areas such as coaching education or technology are also considered part of the extended soccer leadership team.

The new directors of soccer will join that team and help connect it.

‘Strategic and technical depth’ is a must

The big unknown is who will consider or be considered for the new roles. There are no true equivalents at pro clubs or anywhere across the American soccer landscape.

They require a range of experience — “experience working with elite soccer players,” but also “experience working with external stakeholders (e.g., investors, owners, donors, sponsors, business partners) to align resources in support of strategic plans and initiatives,” according to the job posting.

A candidate also must “have a combination of strategic and technical depth,” Helfrich said. They must be able to mold soccer methodologies and “be a key voice of the federation, at places ranging from an ECNL (Elite Clubs National League) symposium to an MLS or NWSL or USL boardroom,” Helfrich explained.

He added: “Oftentimes when I’m talking to people about technical leadership in the federation, they immediately try to have a metaphor of a professional club, and what a sporting director is, or a technical director is, or an academy director is. And what’s really important for people to understand is that this scope is dramatically broader than those corollaries.”

He clarified that some people currently in those club roles “might be fantastic candidates” for the U.S. Soccer jobs, but the jobs themselves are very different.

And although the candidates do not have to be American, Helfrich said, “they have to have a deep understanding of the American soccer landscape. We believe that the system that’s going to propel us forward is a uniquely American system that obviously borrows from leading practices around the world, but that leans into the fact that we have certain strengths and advantages that are ours, and we should unapologetically embrace them. So, that’s going to be important — that someone’s background allows them to understand that.”

When asked if he wanted to hire a woman for the women’s role and a man for the men’s role, Helfrich said: “I want to hire great people, and I want to have a wide variety of people at the leadership table.”

He also noted that the two roles, despite having very similar job descriptions, might ultimately differ in practice.

“The profile of the person, and how they spend their hours and days and weeks, could look different between the girls’ and women’s side and the men’s and boys’ side, because those games, while obviously they share certain elements, are evolving in different ways,” Helfrich said. “And we believe they each deserve the focus to evolve in the right way.”

Pochettino and Hayes’ big impact

The restructuring, in many ways, stems from the hiring of Hayes and Pochettino, two coaches who double as powerful figures in women’s and men’s soccer.

Hayes’ first few months in 2024 were narrowly focused on the Olympics, but after winning gold in Paris, she began constructing a plan to essentially revolutionize women’s and girls’ soccer, from the USWNT all the way down “to the younger age groups,” as she said in early 2025. She spoke to everyone from youth coaches to performance scientists, from data analysts to U.S. Soccer Federation marketing gurus, and “challeng(ed) everybody across the federation, internally,” to make sure they were building women’s soccer through a female lens.

She also sought to build a better pathway to the USWNT. She’s been “supporting and generating ideas for the pathway,” as Helfrich said, ever since.

But she can’t do it alone, and that, in part, is where the new director of soccer comes in. “Having additional empowered executive talent with the responsibility for the women and girls pathway increases the pace at which we’ll be able to drive those ideas and make them reality,” Helfrich said.

On the men’s side, too, whereas Pochettino’s early work focused almost exclusively on the senior team, his new contract comes with expanded influence. “He and the coaching staff will also advise and support U.S. Soccer on the broader development of the full national team pathway, youth soccer, coaching education, professional league collaboration and other technical facets across the soccer community,” the federation said in a news release this month.

The following week, Pochettino’s top assistant, Jesús Pérez, was at U.S. Soccer headquarters in Georgia for multiple days full of meetings to develop a deeper understanding of the organization, and to share ideas.

During post-World Cup negotiations between Pochettino’s team and U.S. Soccer, Helfrich and Batson had shared their own vision for the sporting department’s new structure, and the hope is that it will help bring Pochettino’s ideas to life.

“The new director of men’s and boys’ soccer will be a way for those ideas, from Mauricio or Jesús or any other members of the senior staff, to find their way into the broader system, whether that’s for coaching education, for youth development, competitive standards, etc.,” Helfrich said.

In general, Helfrich noted, both Pochettino and Hayes know the broader system must improve. “And while the women and girls system and the men’s and boys’ system are in different places, neither are consistently and predictably creating the volume of world-class players that we aspire to.” Helfrich said. “So, they’re excited about more investment and more intentionality in how we build and manage that system.”