Watching Cavan Sullivan, excitement is tempered by memories of hypetrains past

The trouble with trying not to hype up Cavan Sullivan is that he keeps on doing cool stuff. Like this past weekend, when he scampers along on a Philadelphia Union breakaway, loses his man by stopping so suddenly it’s as if he’s pulled a ripcord, back-heels the cutback behind his standing leg, watches it slowly kiss off the far post and in, and celebrated the goal by bowing and doffing an imaginary top hat to the crowd.

Like when he doubles the score by setting up an attack and finishing it himself with a left-footed lash through the goalkeeper’s legs form an acute angle. Like when he fashions yet another goal by holding up the play and then suddenly springs a teammate up the right flank.

And that’s just this past weekend.

It’s hard not to get worked up when an American, two weeks and a day before his 17th birthday, almost matches Lionel Messi for goal involvements in Major League Soccer and the Leagues Cup since the World Cup. When he powers an entire team of grown men to a 10-game unbeaten run. When he breaks Freddy Adu’s record as the youngest Major League Soccer debutant by 13 days, at 14 years and 293 days old. When he has netted six goals and five assists in his last eight matches. When he appears to be on the eve of his first United States men’s national team call-up.

Advanced statistics support his confident, stylish play. These numbers suggest he has already had the best MLS season ever recorded by a teenager, better than Alphonso Davies did. In fact, he is currently the second-best American player in the league.

What makes Cavan Sullivan so exciting is that he is not just a hypothetical talent.

But we still feel uneasy.

We have faced this situation before. As King Lear warned, going down that path leads to madness, so we should avoid it.

As an American soccer community, we have developed a reflexive recoil against the Godding up of yet another prodigy. Still, it’s hard to resist, even though we know better. From the experience of Bobby Convey, and Jamar Beasley, and John O’Brien, and Jozy Altidore, and Juan Agudelo, and Brek Shea, and Julian Green, and Gedion Zelalem. They had skills and bodies and brains we could dream on, which we never managed to resist.

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Did you even remember Green and Zelalem? Green is 31 and presently without a club; Zelalem, now 29, plays for New Mexico United. Both were promised to us as potentially first American male superstar when they emerged from the Bayern Munich and Arsenal academies, respectively. But then, all the men on that list, and so many more, were supposed to be that. None of them were.

We’ve been doing this since the 1970s, when it was decided that Kyle Rote Jr, son of the gridiron football hero, would put soccer on the map. He did indeed become famous, but much less for what he did on a soccer field than for thrice winning the popular gameshow Superstars – wherein top players from different sports competed in a series of athletic events. He led the North American Soccer League in scoring as a rookie and then tailed off, taking a “sabbatical” to lead a hunger relief mission to Cambodia in 1980 and never playing soccer again.

Not all of them failed. Several had solid professional careers. Altidore played very well for the United States men’s national team. He is still its third highest goal scorer of all time, behind Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey. But his club career mainly consists of two good seasons in the Netherlands and about six strong seasons in Major League Soccer. This came after five different European clubs had let him go.

There’s still no telling, exactly, what the now-23-year-old Gio Reyna might or might not become. His body hasn’t cooperated, breaking down again and again, and neither has he managed to muster the consistency to become a regular and productive starter on a European club (that may change this season with Strasbourg). He’s bounced around, largely anonymously, briefly resurfacing for World Cups. It feels like a long time ago now, when he was 17 and fit seamlessly into Borussia Dortmund’s attacking diamond with Erling Haaland, Jude Bellingham and Jadon Sancho.

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Of all the chosen ones, only Christian Pulisic has really panned out something like we had hoped. He has, however, never really been the focal point in the attack of any of his three European clubs. And he’s developed an odd penchant for falling out of favor after two or three seasons, tumbling down the depth chart at Dortmund and then Chelsea and now Milan. Under new manager Ruben Amorim, Pulisic, the author of 52 goals and assists over the last three Serie A campaigns – albeit notably fewer of them in the 2025-26 season – has been benched and has appeared just once in the Italian league.

And all of them toiled under the looming specter of Adu. More than two decades on from Freddymania, his name is still invoked as a cautionary tale. He works as a personal skills coach now, and has done since last playing professionally five years ago.

So we proceed carefully, taking great pains not to make the same mistakes again.

The point is, Sullivan has already scored more goals in two-thirds of an MLS season than Adu did in his best-scoring season. That was his rookie year with DC United in 2004. The league is much harder to score in these days. It is also better set up to handle truly outstanding talent.

Unlike most of the others, there are real numbers there. Real performances. Real highlight clips, captured at the senior level against credible opposition. Manchester City certainly think he’s real, long ago arranging for his transfer when he turns 18. It’s all there, other than the size of Sullivan himself. That may prove problematic. But then he wouldn’t be the first undersized superstar.

And yet.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is the author of The Long Game: US Men’s Soccer and Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey to the Top, or Thereabouts, which is out now. He teaches at Marist University.