Christian Pulisic doesn’t make it easy. Not on himself, not on those around him, not on the U.S. men’s national team fans who love him and endlessly cheer for him and have been waiting — and waiting and waiting — for him to become the program’s greatest player of all time.
Pulisic has taken a lot of fire since the USMNT’s disappointing departure from the FIFA World Cup. For the most part, all of it is fair and expected. When I was covering the New York Yankees in the early 2000s, Derek Jeter once told me that he learned, very quickly, that “you don’t only get to be famous on the good days.” That is Pulisic’s reality, too.
Landon Donovan says Pulisic’s inner circle is a problem. U.S. women’s national team legends Carli Lloyd and Sydney Leroux didn’t love Pulisic talking about how he was going to get some rest for his injured leg after being eliminated. Tim Howard indicated he felt similarly to Donovan, saying on a podcast about Pulisic that “when someone shows you who they are, believe them.”
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None of it really matters. If you are a person who wants to have faith in this American team and the ability of Pulisic to help raise it to new levels, that noise is far less important than some objective facts:
First, Pulisic was not good at this World Cup.
He played 45 minutes of amazing soccer in the opening match against Paraguay. Then he didn’t play again in the group stage until a shake-the-rust-off appearance against Türkiye in a meaningless game two weeks later. The game against Bosnia-Herzegovina was fine, but unremarkable. The defeat to Belgium, in which he lost the ball 14 times, was a nightmare. The closest he came to approaching consistent star level at this tournament was when he was alongside Lionel Messi in those endless commercials.
Second, Pulisic has an injury issue.
No one knows what he is feeling or how badly he is hurt in any given moment other than him, so there is no point in saying he “should have played through” something, or that he was “soft” for missing time. All we know for sure is that he sustained a bone bruise and microfracture in his lower leg in this tournament, and that he’s not reliably available. This meaningfully hurts him in short-term discussions about this tournament as well as larger “greatest USMNT player” debates because longevity (and sustained excellence) is such a central piece of Donovan’s and Clint Dempsey’s cases.
Third, Pulisic has an optics problem.
Part of it may be bad luck and out of his control (like injury issues). Other elements, though, feel avoidable. Pulisic largely presents as a classic minimizer — something many athletes are, as presumably it reduces the feelings of pressure — but saying things like this World Cup is “just another big tournament,” as he did earlier this year, or putting in his post-elimination social media statement that “it’s just the start for us and for this sport in America” comes off as disconnected (if not outright alienating) to many who live and die with this team.
Because let’s be real: It isn’t the start for this team, a bulk of whose members also played in the 2022 World Cup. It also certainly isn’t the start for soccer in this country, not when the crowds were as intense and passionate as the U.S. experienced at every game it played, while the mainstream traction the team inspired was higher than ever before.
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The notion of this World Cup being the beginning of anything is bizarre. This World Cup was supposed to be a peak, both for this group of players and for Pulisic specifically. That it wasn’t is the sort of missed opportunity that, unfortunately, never gets forgotten.
What comes next? It’s hard to say.
We know Pulisic will never be a rah-rah type of leader for the national team; that clearly isn’t his temperament, and it is telling that both Mauricio Pochettino and Gregg Berhalter before him chose someone else to be their World Cup captains. It is difficult to imagine Pulisic suddenly changing his outward persona in the aftermath of this tournament.
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In terms of his talent and production, Pulisic’s accomplishments for his club teams have always been a source of optimism for U.S. fans. But he has been more inconsistent this season, with no goals since December for Milan, and unlike Dempsey when he was with Tottenham Hotspur or Fulham, Pulisic is far from the only American player competing regularly at a top European level. If he’s going to differentiate himself and live up to the expectations that his talent inspires, he needs to do more and, ideally, do it while wearing a USA jersey.
Time is the trickiest part. Four years from now, Pulisic will be 31. He plays a position that is traditionally best filled by younger players, and given his injury history, it is difficult to project just how meaningful he will be to the next U.S. World Cup team. He has delivered one incredible moment in a World Cup — the goal against Iran to send the Americans through to the knockout rounds in Qatar four years ago — yet the promise with Pulisic always seemed to offer something higher.
Could that Iran euphoria end up being the best it ever got with Pulisic and the national team? Yes. Could there be an early-30s renaissance that surges past it? Absolutely. It is easy to dream it, easy to doubt it, impossible to feel confident in any of it.
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It is, by some distance, the most frustrating and confounding part of what happened to the U.S. over this past month.
Everything pointed toward Pulisic being America’s biggest star at this World Cup. Instead, he was — and remains — the team’s biggest mystery.
