With no Pulisic and good results, have the USMNT moved on from their savior complex? | Leander Schaerlaeckens

In 1990, then-United States men’s national team manager Bob Gansler made a critical and somewhat controversial choice. He left three of the program’s laureled veterans at home and brought a young and little-tested team to the World Cup in Italy, the USA’s first in 40 years.

As Gansler recalled later: “I was thinking not only for ’90, but I was thinking about the 90s.”

In 1998, Steve Sampson was looking to the future as well. He had lucked into the USMNT’s managerial gig and had barely clung on to it going into that year’s World Cup, but he nevertheless made a confident proclamation. “In 10 to 15 years, we’ll win the title, there’s no doubt about it,” he told the Washington Post. “When we Americans decide to do something, we’ll see it through.”

A sense took hold sometime during that period, while never really acknowledged or said out loud, that the USMNT were the team of the future.

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They never really stopped being that. And this bullishness on the hazily outlined not-right-now-but-definitely-sometime-later-on tended to coalesce around one player, maybe two. The USMNT made their modern World Cup breakthrough powered by the energy and unfettered talent of 20-year-olds Landon Donovan and DaMarcus Beasley in 2002. When those two foundered at the 2006 World Cup, another young player, Clint Dempsey, emerged. That year, a 16-year-old Freddy Adu made his USMNT debut.

And so a pattern formed: the US soccer community waited to be lifted to the next plane by a savior. The next kid. Or maybe the one after that. He’ll do it for us. Or else the next one will.

Dempsey outlasted Donovan and faded just as Christian Pulisic emerged. Because even as a golden-ish generation coalesced around him, Pulisic was seen as the player expected to make something happen at the 2026 World Cup, the culmination of an eight-year project of rebuilding the national team. He was expected to activate Hero Mode, the way he briefly had in Qatar in 2022, throwing himself in front of a cross at the expense of a pelvic contusion but bundling the make-or-break winner into the Iranian goal.

He never did it in 2026. Aside from a great first half in the tournament opener, Pulisic’s home World Cup was a bust, and the USMNT’s campaign ended with a whimper.

On its face, it felt odd that Mauricio Pochettino should launch a youth movement in the first camp after the World Cup. The core of his team had hardly aged out; all but defender Tim Ream are comfortably on the right side of 30. All the same, he called in 13 debutants and eight teenagers.

If results in the months after a World Cup count for anything at all, they have vindicated the Argentinian’s decision to freshen things up. The kids, sprinkled in among a robust base of veterans, reeled off 4-1 and 4-2 victories over Peru and Chile, respectively, before dispatching Mexico in a merciless 3-0 walloping. On Tuesday, they concluded this jumbo-sized international window with a mature 1-0 win over Canada in a scruffy, scrappy game, vanquishing a team whose fierceness and physicality had given the US a great deal of trouble in the recent past.

What was startling, however, wasn’t just how much young talent is waiting down the depth chart – or now, perhaps, very much on the surface of it – but how little Pulisic, the latest savior, was missed in his absence. You easily might have forgotten that he wasn’t even there while watching a composed and polished team reel off four straight wins. The same was true for Weston McKennie, one of the USMNT’s load-bearing players for the last half decade. They both stayed with their Italian clubs, either hoping to use the time off to get back in favor with their manager (Pulisic at Milan) or to heal up an injury (McKennie at Juventus).

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In their absence, so many players carried the load, contributing in ways big and small, taking turns coming up with the big play, that the burden was never on any one player. Cavan Sullivan may well be next in line in the succession of the USMNT’s star players – or maybe it will be Julian Hall, or Adri Mehmeti, or Zavier Gozo, or Justin Ellis, or Mathis Albert – but there was no intimation that this was his ship to propel under his own power. This was not Sullivan’s team now, as then-manager Bruce Arena told Pulisic after the US failed to reach the 2018 World Cup in Russia.

The big takeaway from this mega-pack of an international break – which encompassed more games than the USMNT’s run at several big tournaments – is that this team may, at long last, no longer be so dependent on one player, or even a small handful of them.

If this program is entering into a post-savior age – moving on from Pulisic-pendencia, as it were, or whoever-pendencia – that’s a clearer sign of progress than the emergence of some new prodigy, or indeed a cluster of them.

What this team, and this soccer country writ large, appear to have grown instead, is the kind of depth US fans used to envy in other, more developed soccer nations. If at the 2030 World Cup, the US TV commercials don’t all feature the same player, in the way Pulisic largely hogged the commercial blocks this past summer, it will represent another step forward.

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.

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