America finally has a global soccer star

America Finally Has a Global Soccer Star
Christian Pulisic isn’t just the best male soccer player the country has ever produced—he’s also one of the best in the world. With more homegrown talent following in his footsteps, is he ready to be the leading man that U.S. soccer has been waiting for?

Christian Pulisic is tired and bruised, but mostly he's tired of being bruised. “I'm pretty banged up,” he says, rolling up the right leg of his olive Nike sweatpants to show me his shin, which is spattered black and blue, like a Miró painting. “I've got some kicks up and down my leg here. That”—a streak the color of unwashed denim—“was from the kick on the calf yesterday, and I got some on the other leg…” He rolls up the other, and sure enough, that too looks as if he spent last night kickboxing rather than playing soccer against Sevilla in the Champions League. (The game ended 0–0, a solid, if unspectacular, result for Chelsea, Pulisic's team, which right now is one of the four best clubs in England's Premier League and among the top 15 in the world.)

Pulisic shrugs. “I'll be okay for this weekend,” he says. For most of his life—even before he was tearing apart elite teams like Liverpool and Manchester City, before Chelsea paid a $73 million transfer fee to make him the most expensive American soccer player ever, before people were saying he might already be the best American player ever—people have been kicking chunks out of him. Partly it's the way he plays, how he skips between defenders on the balls of his feet, treating incoming tackles the way a slackliner handles a gust of wind. His determination to stay upright is a rare quality in soccer, a sport in which some of the greatest players—Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar—are vilified for their toddlerish histrionics, writhing in agony at the slightest contact. Not Pulisic. The hits bounce off him, or he off them, so that watching him dribble is like watching a spinning top that totters and swerves before somehow righting itself at the last moment. “He gets clobbered but keeps charging forward,” Roger Bennett, cohost of the soccer podcast Men in Blazers, says. “Christian does not go down. He soaks up a ton of punishment.”