What comes next for Christian Pulisic, the U.S. soccer star who can never live up to the hype?

If you walk around Times Square and stand in the glow of the commercials flashing all around, it’s possible to succumb to a delusion that the USMNT is still in the World Cup.

Blown up and out of all proportion, Christian Pulisic intermittently looms over the crowds. He is reaching for the World Cup. Panglossian ads have not been pulled after the USMNT’s exit against Belgium. Turn on FOX and Pulisic keeps scoring from a corner kick in an imaginary final against Brazil. Archive footage of him either standing over a penalty or a free kick in real life is spliced together to make it look genuine. His AI-generated right foot then curls in the unlikeliest of goals. It’s a thin line between manifest destiny and a strain of derangement syndrome.

In Fantasyland, Kurt Andersen’s 500-year history of the United States, he makes the argument that religion, entertainment culture, internet fragmentation and market-driven media incentives have all created an environment where fantasy and reality become difficult to distinguish. Perhaps an updated version will have a chapter on the USMNT and the 2026 World Cup. After the Bosnia & Herzegovina game, FOX’s pundits got carried away.

Landon Donovan didn’t see why the USMNT couldn’t go all the way. When the presenter Rebecca Lowe asked Zlatan Ibrahimovic if they could win it, Ibrahimovic, a senior advisor to the executive team of Pulisic’s club, AC Milan, replied: “Yes.”

In the end, the 16th-ranked team in the world left the competition in the round of 16. “Why not us?” turned to “Why never us?” A miracle did not happen. Marvel superheroes did not emerge. Captain America got injured. It calls to mind yet another commercial, one that has Pulisic in a hotel lobby where he improbably joins forces with Lionel Messi. They appear on the same side, only it’s Pulisic, not Messi, who scores the winner. But here’s the thing: Pulisic is not quite the player he is marketed as. He would not share the same set as Messi without being American in the lead-up to a World Cup in North America. Talented though he undoubtedly is, he cannot win games by himself. The players who can — Messi, Kylian Mbappe — remain in the tournament. He has been held to a standard set by ad executives rather than his own very good — but not great — ability. Pundits lose sight of this.

The marketing has given a false impression. Pulisic has benefited from it, of that there can be no doubt. Since his teenage years, he has been seized upon in the much the same way Freddy Adu once was as the American face of the global game. Except Pulisic actually had the bona fides. He has played for Dortmund, Chelsea and Milan. He was part of a Champions League-winning team. Doing that downstream of the 1994 World Cup, MLS’s inauguration and David Beckham’s efforts to make the U.S. embrace soccer laid the foundation not only for a player like Pulisic to emerge, but to monetise like no other player in American soccer player in history.

His endorsements deal must be the envy of some of his critics among ex-USMNT players. The cost to Pulisic comes in expectation management. How do you live up to this hype? Unless your career gets a second wind and goes to another level, at 27, you can’t. It is, in part, why disappointment in Pulisic plumbed new depths since Belgium shattered the American dream of a run to the quarter-finals and beyond.

The team as a whole looked overawed by the occasion. The controversy surrounding the suspension of Folarin Balogun’s red card clearly affected preparation. Belgium’s unexpected line-up without Romelu Lukaku, Kevin De Bruyne and Jeremy Doku also seemed to confuse the players and, at the end of the day, the U.S. lost 4-1 to a team that beat them 5-2 in March.

Who do you scapegoat? President Donald Trump? US Soccer? Matt Freese? Minds were made up by a post-match interview rather than an actual performance. When Pulisic talked through his injury-enforced substitution with FOX’s Jenny Taft, he said: “I mean, I just twisted my ankle and sprained my ankle. It’s just frustrating to end like that, of course. And now I get time to rest, so it’ll be OK.”

The line did more damage than the contact with Youri Tielemans that caused him to go off at a time when his team was in need of the kind of World Cup comeback other players have been able to inspire in this tournament. “You would have had to drag me off the field,” Donovan said. His FOX colleague, the two-time World Cup winner Carli Lloyd, posted on X: “You rest when your playing career is over. Period.”

It was over the top. But an impression has formed: Part-Time Pulisic. Pick’em Pulisic. He plays when he wants. Neymar had a similar reputation at PSG. But is it fair? Pulisic was on crutches in the team hotel the day after the USMNT’s elimination. As first reported by The Athletic, he suffered a microfracture in his right leg and did so attempting a shot to get his team back into the game. The injury would have ruled him out of the rest of the World Cup if the US had progressed and met Spain in Los Angeles.

When the news broke, remarkably, some people doubted it. It didn’t seem to matter that it was confirmed by Milan and US Soccer. In light of the full facts, some felt Pulisic’s critics should say sorry. Hadn’t the ex-players become everything they used to hate themselves in their own playing days? Sensationalist talking heads, stepping out of their cleats to make clickbait?

“I don’t owe anyone an apology,” Lloyd posted. “My comment wasn’t about his post-game interview. He skipped Gold Cup last summer because he wanted to rest and be ready for WC. He ended up resting the whole year. That’s the facts. Nothing personal against him.”

How Pulisic handled that decision a year ago has come back to haunt him. He didn’t get out in front of the story of his withdrawal. By the time he did, it was too late and he misspoke as he did after Belgium, revealing he would actually have played the friendlies preceding the Gold Cup, just not the Gold Cup itself because: “I was starting to think what is best and what is going to be best for me going into next year and going into the World Cup and was that to play eight more games and then get no rest at all, go straight into preseason and then grind another year and then go straight into the World Cup? That’s not what I felt was best for my body.”

None of this detracted from his love for the national team, but it did reduce sympathy for him. In soccer, they talk a lot about rest defence. It’s about using the ball to take a breather. Your opponent then has to chase after it. They tire out. Pulisic needs to learn to do the same with the microphone. Ultimately, rest is no defence in his own personal comms strategy and crisis management. His past year has been weaponised against him. You’ll have heard the stat. It’s become a go-to for Taylor Twellman and Nick Wright. How Pulisic scored only once between January 1 and the start of USMNT’s training camp for the World Cup.

Pulisic’s form in the first half of the season in Milan was unsustainable. He averaged a goal or an assist every 65 minutes, deciding big games against champions Napoli and their successors Inter. However, he couldn’t always start and didn’t always play 90 minutes, even in a season when Milan were without European football. In the second half of the campaign, he was afflicted by bursitis. Most of all, he struggled with Milan’s style of play under Max Allegri. It was low-block suffer-ball and, after over-performing up to Christmas, Milan not only regressed to the mean, they collapsed through it, going from title contenders to falling out of the top four on the final day of the season.

Some of the responsibility, naturally, fell on the players. Milan’s owner, Gerry Cardinale, found fault with everything. The day after the season ended, he took drastic action, dismissing chief executive Giorgio Furlani, sporting director Igli Tare, technical director Geoff Moncada and Allegri. That’s the environment in which Pulisic prepared for the World Cup. Once his rest is over, he will, of course, return to Milan. He is expected to be out for several weeks as he recovers from the microfracture sustained in Seattle.

It raises the question: what does Pulisic’s career look like after the World Cup in the US? He in effect has two years left on his contract with Milan, as the club retains the option, at the end of this coming season, to roll it over for another year. Should he stay? Milan have been through four coaches in Pulisic’s time at the club. They have failed to qualify for the Champions League in back-to-back years. During his time at Dortmund or Chelsea, he never missed out on the competition. The inability to replace Olivier Giroud when he departed for LAFC at the end of Pulisic’s first season has been a problem.

Divock Origi disappeared and retired soon after leaving Milan. Vast amounts of money — around €85m (or $97m) — have been wasted on Santi Gimenez, Alvaro Morata and Christopher Nkunku. Last season, it led Allegri to play Pulisic and Rafa Leao as a pair of counter-attacking strikers. They were out of position and often a long, long way from goal. It was only enjoyable when they were winning.

At the end of the season, Leao announced his intention to leave. “I’d like to try a new challenge in a new league,” he told SportTV. Pulisic has kept his counsel, although The Athletic understands, through people familiar with the situation, that he will wait and see before renewing his contract. Since he joined Milan, only Inter’s strike partnership of Lautaro Martinez and Marcus Thuram have combined, individually, for more goals and assists (52 in 100 appearances) than the American. He is not the club’s highest earner. Leao and Nkunku make more without the same output. Nkunku, in particular, had a very disappointing first season at San Siro.

If there are reservations about Milan’s project, Cardinale has creditably sought to resolve them this summer. Earlier this week, in his first press conference since acquiring the club in 2022, he admitted: “I’ve been hands-off in my ownership, so the wake-up call for everybody is: those days are over.”

He personally led the restructuring process, making Milan his No 1 priority, flying to Germany, Austria, Portugal and the UK to meet candidates for various roles. Allegri’s replacement, Ruben Amorim, is his man, his choice. “We’re not going to play, not to lose,” Cardinale said. “We’re going to play to win, which means we’re going to look at a football style that meets that objective, and that is a high press, high possession, attacking style of football. It’ll be exciting football. It’ll be fun to watch, and it’ll be high-scoring.”

This should be music to Pulisic’s ears. Cardinale and Amorim want him to be a part of Milan’s future. They believe the project should have renewed appeal to him. “He is perfect for the way I think about football,” Amorim said. “Especially here in Italy, where sometimes the teams defend so well there is less space between the lines, he is a player who can make the difference in that kind of space.” 

Pulisic won’t be expected to play striker any more either. The Athletic broke the story that Milan agreed a club-record fee with PSG for Goncalo Ramos and understands Amorim was in touch with Pulisic, as he was with all his new players, during the World Cup.

If Pulisic hesitates before committing to a new deal, he will have to back himself and deliver. In the grand scheme of things, the name most people will remember from the USMNT’s World Cup will, for better and worse, be Balogun, not Pulisic.

Twenty-eight in September, Pulisic’s next contract will perhaps be the last of his prime. As productive as he has been for Milan, it is worth remembering he was 12th in minutes across all competitions last season. As such, Pulisic needs, once again, to prove people wrong and show what he’s worth if he is to attract a contract offer in line with his own expectations or, alternatively, generate interest from clubs competing in the Champions League. The ambition to play in that competition again makes leaving for MLS unlikely in the short term. A soft approach from New York City FC, raised at ownership level, never led anywhere, as Cardinale’s desire is to keep the player.

The rest is up to Pulisic.