Fashion Week has kicked off in Milan. And Christian Pulisic is wearing a blue Ritz crackers sweatshirt.
The U.S. soccer star known as Captain America could have met me anywhere on this late February evening. As an elite athlete on AC Milan, one of the world’s most iconic soccer clubs, he could have picked a restaurant that comps the team’s players, arrived in a Maserati, discussed his journey to the 2026 World Cup, then dashed off to some swanky shindig.
Nope.
In a week that would see stars like Alicia Keys, Kendall Jenner, and David Beckhamcome through town to sit front row, Pulisic arrives on a scooter to a golf-club lounge near the airport, decked out in comfy, and not exactly couture, apparel.
The distance from the scene is intentional. Pulisic lives beside the course, in the nondescript far stretches of this cultural capital, because it’s a 20-minute commute to the AC Milan training complex. And while his parents and friends encourage him to enjoy the spoils of his status, Pulisic parties like a monk. “This is how I stay the most focused,” says Pulisic, 27.
Pulisic brought that intensity to bear at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar in what would become his defining moment. Late in the first half of the U.S. team’s must-win game against Iran, midfielder Weston McKennie played a ball to Sergiño Dest, streaking up the right side of the field toward the Iranian goal. “My eyes lit up,” says Pulisic now. He bull-charged toward the box, took Dest’s header off his right foot, and smashed into the Iranian keeper as the ball touched the net, sacrificing his well-being for the good of the team. He suffered a pelvic contusion and had to watch the second half from a hospital bed, but his goal gave the Americans a 1-0 lead they would never relinquish. “That’s what stamps your legacy,” says Pulisic.
Now he can really enhance it. As an American soccer prodigy who blazed a path once thought near impossible for a player from the States, Pulisic is already the most influential American men’s soccer player in the country’s 250-year history. What the introverted, 5-ft. 10-in. forward from Hershey, Pa., lacks in pizzazz, he’s made up for in performance: in 2018 he became the U.S. team’s youngest captain in the modern era, and he’s still the only American man to play in, and win, a Champions League final. But this summer he’ll face his biggest spotlight yet as the U.S. hosts the FIFA World Cup, alongside Canada and Mexico, for the first time in more than three decades.
As the face of Team USA, Pulisic will be everywhere, appearing in campaigns for, among others, Puma, Degree, Michelob Ultra, Gatorade, McDonald’s, Chobani, and yes, Ritz. But he’ll also be carrying the weight of American impatience. At this home World Cup, American soccer fans and pundits are demanding more than a typical token slot in the knockout round. They’ve heard, over and over, about how the American talent pool is deeper than ever, now that the sport has caught on here. So why hasn’t the U.S. returned to a men’s World Cup quarterfinal in the past 24 years?
To reach that stage of the tournament or beyond, Pulisic’s prowess is essential. “Going at the goal, creating attacking actions, for me, that’s why I play the game,” Pulisic says. “You obviously have to do all the other parts, defend and run, different things. That’s fine and all. But what gives me joy and excitement is creating ways to score, and scoring goals and finishing them.”
An elephant, however, now looms. Pulisic has finished nothing this year. He has gone 17 matches without scoring a goal for AC Milan, his worst streak in his club career, and he hasn’t scored for the U.S. team since November 2024. Before January, Marco Messina, who covers Italy’s top league, Serie A, for CBS Sports and Paramount+, called Pulisic arguably its most consistent player. Now his assessment is more measured. “We don’t want to be prisoners of the moment too much,” he says. “But we also have to say the truth. He does not look like himself right now.”
This World Cup, which FIFA president Gianni Infantino has declared “the greatest event that humanity, that mankind, has ever seen and will ever see,” offers the cleanest possible slate for Pulisic. Score some goals, make a run on native soil, all will be forgotten. Earlier this year, U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino set the semifinals as a goal. But after the Americans lost home friendlies to Belgium and Portugal in March, he stated his team has no top-100 players. So the U.S. and its premier talent, Pulisic, enter the World Cup opener against Paraguay on June 12 in Los Angeles as question marks.
Just the time for Pulisic to turn all the negative talk on its head. “This summer is huge,” says former U.S. national-team star Tab Ramos. “He could potentially become an American icon, doing something no one has ever done before. This is going to be Christian Pulisic’s team. It’s right in front of him.”
Pulisic’s story starts in Hershey, where, as a 2-year-old, he’d scale the inside walls of his home as a party trick for his parents’ friends. The son of two college soccer players who met at George Mason University, Pulisic was one of those preternaturally coordinated kids who rode a two-wheeler at 3. He had a nose for soccer. Pulisic could explain the game’s convoluted offside rule by the age of 5, and sit and watch entire Champions League matchups with his father Mark on the basement TV. “Kids don’t do that,” says Mark.
Pulisic continued his global soccer education in England, when he was 7. His mother Kelley, a PE instructor, won a Fulbright teaching award, so the family spent a year in Tackley, a village near Oxford. On a concrete slab near his school, Pulisic went up against older boys. “He had to survive on his own on the hard court,” says Mark. “I just remember him out there all the time, having fun. We’d have to pull him off the court to get to dinner.”
After the Fulbright, the Pulisics moved to Michigan, where Mark, who had played eight seasons of professional indoor soccer, got a job coaching Detroit’s indoor team. During the family’s three-year stay there, and upon their return to Hershey, Pulisic developed into a standout youth player. Travel teams from across the country would call Mark and Kelley, asking them to fly him out for “guest” roles on their squads in tournaments. The consistent answer: absolutely not. “We didn’t want him to get burned out,” says Mark. Pulisic would typically train with his local team twice a week and play in a weekend tournament reachable by car. He had room to just be a kid.
Ramos, who would serve as youth technical director for U.S. Soccer from 2013 through 2019, first spotted Pulisic when he was 12, facing older competition in the Washington, D.C., area. “I see this little kid that looks like he doesn’t belong on the field, like he’s going to get hurt,” says Ramos. “And then every time he got the ball, it almost seemed like the world stopped. I’ve never seen anyone dominate the game by playing so simple. I really can’t relate it to any other youth game that I’ve seen, in the U.S. or overseas.” Ramos went to the sideline to ask Mark, who was coaching Pulisic’s team, if he could call U.S. Soccer about his son.
But U.S. Soccer had already been in touch. Soon enough, so was Europe. Borussia Dortmund, in Germany, offered Pulisic a contract when he was 15. The Pulisics held a family meeting at their oak kitchen table. “There were tears,” says Kelley. The family did not want to pull Pulisic’s sister Devyn, older by 17 months, out of high school in Hershey so they could all move to Germany. They decided to split up: Pulisic and Mark would live in Dortmund while the others stayed back. “It sounds great to be a professional soccer player—that’s all I ever wanted—but the idea of actually doing it was terrifying to me,” says Pulisic. “I was really scared.”
Pulisic calls that initial period away from home “the most difficult year of my life.” He had given up his high school experience only to find his new teammates—less than keen on some American kid taking their jobs—refuse to pass him the ball. “You just start to feel more and more like, ‘Wow, these guys genuinely don’t want me to succeed,’” says Pulisic. German lessons were a drag. Because of age restrictions for non-E.U. players, Pulisic couldn’t even suit up in league games until he received a Croatian passport some nine months after he arrived. (His paternal grandfather was born there.)
Once he could play, he scored five goals in five games on a Dortmund junior team. Then during an art class, Pulisic received a life-altering text from his youth coach Hannes Wolf: He was invited to first-team training. Wolf also offered Pulisic the most important advice he ever received: Don’t be a fan. Sure, he was about to train with players he grew up watching on TV. But who cares if they’re bigger and better than you? “You have to have that kind of delusional confidence,” says Pulisic. In April 2016, Pulisic, at 17, became the youngest non-German player to ever score in a Bundesliga game.
The U.S. national team also called him up that spring. In May, Pulisic worked up the courage to ask U.S. coach Jürgen Klinsmann, through his agent, if he could attend the senior prom at his old high school back in Hershey the night before a friendly against Bolivia. “It sounded like a high school party or something,” says Klinsmann, a former German national-team star unfamiliar with the concept of prom. He checked with his American wife, who stressed how important it was for any teen to experience this rite of passage. So Pulisic used the money from a Panini sponsorship deal to rent a private jet from Kansas City to Pennsylvania. He posed for pictures, returned the next morning, and by evening, Pulisic was the youngest goal scorer in U.S. national-team history.
A few weeks before his 18th birthday, Pulisic scored two goals in a World Cup qualifier against St. Vincent and the Grenadines. “The hierarchy of a soccer team defines itself by the qualities that you bring to the table,” says Klinsmann. “He can change the rhythm of the game with a couple of movements. Within a training session, he brought himself from the outsider kid into one of the key players.”
That team, however, failed to make the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Although Pulisic could anticipate many more World Cup chances in his future, he felt devastated. “Not a single person in my school ever talked about European soccer,” says Pulisic. “It was like, ‘The World Cup’s coming up. We can support the USA.’ So for me, that was everything.” He tried to take lessons from the experience. “You learn patience, you learn that your time is going to come,” says Pulisic. “Life goes on.”
Then the English Premier League came calling. In January 2019, Chelsea paid Dortmund about $73 million to transfer Pulisic to London. Pulisic spent the COVID disruption of the 2019–2020 season training in Florida and came back blazing: he had five goal contributions (three goals, two assists) in Chelsea’s first five Premier League games, a stretch in which the Blues went 4-1 and put themselves in position to qualify for the Champions League the following season. “He loved when it was COVID,” says close friend Danny Barbir, who now plays in the USL Championship, the second tier of American pro soccer. “He’d wear a mask, he’d wear a hat, and nobody would recognize him. He could go to the grocery store by himself. He genuinely doesn’t like being seen and looked at.”
His Chelsea days ended unevenly. Pulisic scored a key goal, for example, in the first leg of a Champions League semifinal against Real Madrid in 2021, but didn’t even start in the second leg or the final. Coaching changes and injuries kept him in and out of the lineup. “When people say that it wasn’t a successful time, it is interesting to me, because I feel like that’s how everyone’s career kind of goes,” says Pulisic. “It’s not just constantly soaring up.”
Milan offered Pulisic a reset. After he signed with the team in the summer of 2023, a couple hundred fans greeted him at the airport. Pulisic felt wanted. Still, skeptics wondered if RedBird Capital Partners, AC Milan’s American owner, brought Pulisic in to sell more jerseys in the States. “I was going on a lot of Italian TV, radio, podcasts, and they’re like, ‘We have doubts,’” says Messina. “‘Are we just getting a marketing guy? How good is he? Is he going to come off the bench?’”
In his Milan debut, Pulisic rocketed a shot at the top of the 18-yard box right inside the post, in a 2-0 victory over Bologna. “I didn’t do so much thinking and listening to all types of instruction,” says Pulisic. “I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna go play.’” He has delivered in AC Milan’s matchups against heated rival Inter Milan, scoring within 10 minutes in a 2-1 victory over Inter in September 2024, which stopped a six-game derby losing streak for the Rossoneri (“Red and Blacks”). At the 2024–2025 Italian Super Cup final, in Saudi Arabia, he scored the equalizer in Milan’s 3-2 comeback victory. “You could just feel it was all Christian pulling the team back,” says Messina. Over the past three seasons, Pulisic has the third most involvements in all of Serie A (51, with 31 goals, 20 assists).
Pulisic believes that the old knock on Americans—that they can’t quite hack it in the most elite pro settings—is just about gone. “I like to think I’ve helped that in a lot of ways,” he says.
Meanwhile, back in the U.S. last June, Pulisic became embroiled in controversy. To rest his weary body after a long season, Pulisic skipped the Gold Cup tournament with the national team. Former U.S. star Landon Donovan said on FOX Sports that vacationing U.S. players were “pissing me off.” Pulisic said he wanted to play in the pre–Gold Cup friendlies with the national team, but Pochettino, the U.S. coach, opted to keep the summer roster consistent. Pulisic said on a podcast that he respected the decision, but “didn’t understand” it. “That time was difficult for me, because normally I can shut people up with my play,” says Pulisic. “That’s what I’ve done my whole career. I’m in my offseason, so like people are just talking about me, and I can’t just go freaking score and shut them up.”
He muted naysayers, however, soon enough. Pulisic got off a sizzling Serie A start, scoring seven goals in his first nine league games for Milan, including the decider in a 1-0 victory over Inter in November 2025. The U.S. team beat Paraguay and Uruguay in a pair of friendlies that month. Pulisic said he and Pochettino had a productive conversation about the summer situation. The dustup was behind them. On Dec. 28, Pulisic scored his 10th goal of the season across all competitions. Milan moved into first place. And their American star was a scoring machine.
Pulisic does not submit to many interviews. In a rare reflective moment at the Milan golf club, he admits that he struggles with work-life balance. “I have a very specific way of thinking about performance, and I’ve always wanted to be closer to the training ground, because that’s my work, and that’s what I do every single day,” says Pulisic. “It’s helped me in a lot of ways. It has also made me miserable at times.”
While Pulisic is no recluse—he’ll go to an occasional nice dinner with friends—exhortations to step out more go mostly unheeded. “People think it’s easy to be a pro athlete, and it’s a great life,” says Mark. “Believe me, there are tremendous benefits financially, and being in the spotlight. But when you close that door at night and you’re alone, you miss things, you miss family. You can really bring yourself down to terrible states. We just had to make sure we helped manage that.”
Mark insisted that Pulisic live near a golf course in Milan, so he’d have easy access to a recreational outlet offering a mental break from soccer. Pulisic also plays online chess with pals. A 2024 Paramount+ docuseries on Pulisic spotlighted his relationship with pro golfer Alexa Melton. But as of our February meeting, the pair had broken up. “I only look at her in the most positive way,” says Pulisic. “She was a lot of fun, and she supported me in every way. She wanted to push me to enjoy my life a little bit more and do things with her and do things just in general. And I was grateful for that.” He declines to go any deeper on the source of the split.
I catch up with Pulisic, via video, in early April, after a cover shoot in a Milan park. It’s a little over a week after the U.S. lost two games in their March friendly window, by a combined score of 7-2, and while he came across as vulnerable, present, and personable in our initial meetup some six weeks prior, this time around, he seems far less excited to be interviewed. “At the end of the day, if we go in and have a good World Cup, it’ll be all forgotten,” Pulisic says about the U.S. team’s recent losses. “Everyone will talk about how great we do. That’s just the way things go.” He isn’t about to open up about how he is approaching his scoring slump. “I plan on scoring goals,” he says. Does he have a message to anyone concerned about his not scoring this year? “Such bad questions,” Pulisic says. “I’m not concerned about it, man.” He disagrees with Pochettino’s contention that the U.S. lacks a single top-100 player but is in no mood to elaborate.
“He’s saving them all up for the World Cup,” jokes Pulisic’s longtime U.S. teammate Weston McKennie, who plays for the Italian club Juventus, another traditional Serie A power. McKennie, for the record, includes both Pulisic and himself in the world top-100 rankings. “He just tells me, ‘Man, I just feel like whenever I’ve been in this moment in my life, there’s just something big that happens. I feel like something big is going to happen for us,’” says McKennie. “I don’t think any of us are worried whether he’s going to be firing on all cylinders. Because at the end of the day, he always wants to do his best for us, for him, for the fans, for the country. It may not be clicking for him right now. But I have no doubt it will be at the World Cup.”
Pulisic felt he wasn’t easy to be around during the last World Cup, since he took it so seriously. “Which I regret a bit,” he says. Now that his legacy moment, that game winner against Iran, is secure, might he soak in the home-crowd adoration before the opening whistle and play with a smile? Prior World Cup success “definitely relaxes me, in a way. But then the next big games will come and I’m still the same,” says Pulisic with a resigned laugh. “I just hope I’m slightly less unpleasant, if anything.”
Most of the people I spoke to, including Pulisic himself, repeated the same thing. No amount of outside pressure will exceed whatever Pulisic puts on himself. Three days before our first interview, across town from where he’s sitting, the U.S. Olympic men’s hockey team won its first gold medal since 1980, in an overtime classic against Canada. That game inspired him. So can the Americans actually win a World Cup too?
“Yeah,” Pulisic says, though he won’t make some reckless guarantee. “That’s just not how I work,” he says. “But I can sit in my bed at night and picture holding up the World Cup trophy. I did that as a kid. I’m not going to stop. You have to believe. Why not?”
Production: Courage Studio; Groomer: Alessia Bonotto; Wardrobe: Fabiana Guigli
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