Christian Pulisic is out of America’s fresh start and back in Milan’s plans

Christian Pulisic

Photo: Bryan Berlin / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 18, 1998 Hershey
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Champions League 2021 · Super Cup 2021 · Club World Cup 2021 · DFB-Pokal 2017 · Italian Supercup 2025 · Nations League ×3 · German Cup
Individual awards	U.S. Soccer Male Player of the Year

The goal against Lecce came in the fourteenth minute, and it had been most of a year in the making. Christian Pulisic had not scored in Serie A since a night against Verona the previous winter when he opened the scoring in Milan’s comfortable win at San Siro, and he did not dress the moment up. “It hasn’t been an easy year,” he said that night. Later he put it more plainly: “It was a big relief for me for sure to just get a goal.” Days earlier, the United States coach Mauricio Pochettino had named a squad for four friendlies and left the country’s best-known player out of it.

That is a strange place for the most decorated American footballer of his generation to stand. He owns a Champions League winner’s medal and the goal that took the United States through a World Cup group. He has won U.S. Soccer’s Player of the Year award four times, level with Landon Donovan. He has also carried, since his teens, a reputation he has never fully shaken: the player whose body gives way when the stakes are highest. His home World Cup gave that reputation fresh material.

Christian Mate Pulisic grew up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where he was born in September 1998 into a soccer household. His parents, Mark and Kelley, had both played at George Mason University, and his father went on to play indoor soccer professionally before coaching. A family year in England put the boy in the youth ranks of Brackley Town; back home he moved through Michigan Rush and PA Classics. The document that changed everything was a passport. His paternal grandfather came from Olib, a small island off the Croatian coast, and the Croatian citizenship that followed let Borussia Dortmund bring him to Germany as a teenager, a move FIFA’s rules on minors would otherwise have blocked.

Dortmund did not wait long. Thomas Tuchel handed him a Bundesliga debut at 17, and within months he became the youngest non-German to score in the league. The United States called him up at the same age. He won the German Cup with Dortmund, and in the autumn of 2017 he was the one American who looked ready on the night in Couva when a defeat to Trinidad and Tobago cost the country a place at the 2018 World Cup. A year later, at 20 years and 63 days, he became the youngest captain in the national team’s history. “Captain America” stuck.

Chelsea paid about £58 million for him in January 2019 and loaned him back to Dortmund for the rest of that season. In London he scored a perfect hat-trick at Burnley in his first autumn, and in the spring of 2021 he scored at the Bernabéu in the first leg of the Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid. In the final in Porto he came off the bench as Chelsea beat Manchester City 1-0, the first American to play in a Champions League final. Injuries and a carousel of managers then pushed him to the edge of the squad. He told his version of the climb in a memoir, Pulisic: My Journey So Far, published before he turned 25.

Milan bought him in the summer of 2023 for a fee of up to €22 million and gave him the number 11. On the right side of Stefano Pioli’s attack he looked like a player freed from an argument. He scored 15 goals in all competitions in his first season and 17 in his second, won the Supercoppa Italiana and was twice named Serie A Player of the Month. He began his third season at the top of the league’s scoring chart. All ten of his goals that season came before January.

The case against him has always been about availability, and he has never accepted the way it is framed. When he skipped the 2025 Gold Cup to rest after 50 matches for Milan, Donovan said that players skipping the tournament for “a vacation” angered him, and Pochettino answered questions about the decision by saying he was the head coach, “not a mannequin”. Pulisic called those questioning his commitment “way out of line”. The record supports him on part of it: his Milan years have been the most durable of his career. It does not support him on the rest. At the 2022 World Cup he scored the winner against Iran and spent the night in hospital after colliding with the goalkeeper; four years later, at home, his tournament broke down twice.

A calf injury after a strong first half against Paraguay cost him one match and parts of two others. In the round of 16 in Seattle, against Belgium, he struck Youri Tielemans’s leg as he shot early in the second half, limped on and was replaced after 59 minutes. The United States lost 4-1. Scans showed a bone bruise and microfractures in his tibia and fibula. He finished the tournament he had waited his whole career for with no goals and one assist. “I’m disappointed with myself, of course, but I’m going to try to stay positive,” he said.

The summer moved on without him. Milan fired Massimiliano Allegri and hired Rúben Amorim, and Pulisic spent the first three Serie A matches on the bench. He came on at half-time at Lazio in September with Milan two goals down and crossed for Diego Moreira’s first goal in a 2-2 draw; a week later came Lecce. Pochettino, meanwhile, built his September and October squad around new names, among them the 16-year-old Cavan Sullivan. “The World Cup is in four years,” he said. “We need to work with different objectives and goals.”

Pulisic’s contract runs to June 2027, with a club option for one more year, and Italian reports say Milan want to keep him until 2031. He has confirmed the talks without discussing terms. “I want to stay at Milan,” he said, adding that his relationship with Amorim was “great so far”. The next World Cup will arrive when he is 31. Whether Pochettino’s long view includes him depends less on what he says about commitment than on how many matches he finishes between now and then.

Tags: sports, athletes, 2026 FIFA World Cup, chelsea, Borussia Dortmund, AC Milan, Mauricio Pochettino, Christian Pulisic, soccer players