Canada head coach Jesse Marsch speaks to the media after the match against Mexico in the Concacaf Nations League semifinal match at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif., on March 20.Alex Gallardo/Reuters

After the Canadian men’s soccer team was comprehensively beaten 2-0 by Mexico on Thursday night, head coach Jesse Marsch was more than pleased with his team’s showing. Based on word choice, he was delighted.

If he’d said it in Spanish, it might have made sense. But as it was, it sounded a little weird.

“If we can just be a little bit clearer in the final third, and turn some our advantages into real chances, and some of our real chances into goals, then we can start to elevate the overall idea of what the performance was,” Marsch said afterward. “Because from so many other perspectives, the performance was really strong.”

So many other perspectives, except goals.

Contrast this with Marsch’s counterpart in charge of America, Mauricio Pochettino. The U.S. controlled 93 minutes of its game against Panama, missed a million chances, and then lost it in the 94th. If there was ever an instance of a team beaten by bad bounces, this was it.

Pochettino, an Argentinean, slumped into his presser looking like he’d come straight from the vet’s where he’d put his dog down. What positives did he see in his team’s outing?

“I am very disappointed. The way we approached the game, and started the game, wasn’t in the right way. … We play too slow … so comfortable on the pitch. … We didn’t show aggression with the ball,” Pochettino said. “The first half was really painful to see.”

He was even more lacerating in his native tongue. On some level, this is about status. Marsch has some. Pochettino – who’s coached Tottenham, Chelsea and Paris Saint-Germain – has much more. Big coaches don’t mince words. The less a coach minces, the greater the reputation.

Head coach Jesse Marsch reacts from the sideline during the second half of the match against Mexico on March 20.Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

But on some more fundamental level, it’s the difference between the North American approach to sports and the rest of the world’s. We don’t often see this compared head-to-head since so few people coaching on this continent are foreigners. The few who are have been here for years, and learned our rules.

Pochettino is a new arrival. He speaks in the old world way – tending to see what was lacking, rather than what might have been improving.

Marsch, like most North Americans, speaks the other way around. He can only critique within the context of a victory. Losses are the time to talk fluff feathers, even if the bird in question is bald.

That’s not new, but coaches of the not-so-distant past had some rhetorical wiggle. Every once in a while, they’d open up on their employees. Not any more. Any time a coach on this continent critiques his players, even in the broadest terms, it’s big news. When it happens, it’s reasonable – even expected – for the players to fire back.

We don’t talk about the cult of participation much any more, but this behaviour is a distant ripple of that pedagogical movement. They’ve been giving out participation trophies since the 1980s, but it only became a big problem 30 years later.

One of the inflection points was a 2013 New York Times op-ed by author Ashley Merryman. In it, she warned of universities filling up with young adults “who’ve grown up receiving endless awards [to] do the requisite work, but don’t see the need to do it well.”

This connection between coddled child athletes and entitled future workers made intuitive sense to a lot of people. The culture has spent the decade since slowly reconciling it, and then shifting violently in the other direction. There is a dotted line between Merryman’s proposal and the current sense amongst many that higher education must be brought to heel.

One spot that’s been protected from this shift – the sports complex. Today’s coddling coach was yesterday’s coddled player. These people have existed in the realm of play and trophies their whole lives. Nearly every contemporary sports manager working at the top level came of age at the height of the ‘participaction’ era.

The few dinosaurs who didn’t have learned to adapt their behaviour. Those who haven’t have been ejected with force.

Listen to the way coaches talk here versus elsewhere. A foreign coach is often extemporizing. You can hear it in the rise and fall of their voice. They’re thinking about what they’re saying nearly simultaneously to saying it. This is why they sound authentic.

North American coaches drone because they’re working off an internal script. It’s not about what they say, but what they shouldn’t. This habit of avoiding landmines makes their pre- and post-game talks sound like a deposition.

In the rare instances when real emotion inflects their voices, you know they’re about to come out with something they’ll regret.

In South America, coaches and GMs are fired for losing. In North America, they’re fired for losing the team, which is another way of saying they said the wrong thing to the wrong person. Usually a player; sometimes the media. Bottom line – someone was honest when they shouldn’t have been.

This is neither good nor bad. Winners continue to be celebrated and losers reviled. The difference is that the people in charge may feel what they’ve always felt – many speak in a very different way off the record – but now they would never say it.

Calling a thing what it is makes middle-class North Americans uncomfortable. That tendency is one of many reasons we’re in our current mess.

I predict that soon enough – very soon, possibly – North American coaches will start to speak quite differently. What’s happening in Silicon Valley, New York and Washington will trickle down to them. They’ll embrace what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – a former nerd who’s become a combat sports obsessive during his midlife crisis – calls “masculine energy.”

Undoubtedly, they’ll get that just as wrong as the other extreme.

The point of telling it like it is is not making people feel bad. It’s making them feel as if they could and should be better.

You don’t get to that place with insults or chest thumping. You get there by being consistent and straightforward – something we could aspire to, whether we play or not.