If Cavan Sullivan takes the field for the US men’s national team in the coming days, the 16-year-old will join a list of youngest-ever US players that is rich in familiar names. Freddy Adu, the onetime phenom turned cautionary tale, remains the youngest man ever to appear for the United States, and the top 20 is stacked with players most US fans know by heart: Eddie Gaven, Bobby Convey, Christian Pulisic, Yunus Musah and Gio Reyna, the last three still very much part of the current picture and possible future partners for Sullivan in attack.
Sitting just below Adu on that list, and above all five of those names, is a trio almost nobody recognises: Mike Slivinski, Mark Jonas and Nelson Vargas. All three made their debuts in a 1991 friendly against Jamaica, with Slivinski and Jonas both younger at the time than Sullivan will be if he appears this window. Only Vargas ever played for the US again, earning three further caps between 1991 and 1994.
The idea of a 16-year-old representing the United States at senior level has long since been normalised. In the early 1990s it was unheard of, arriving well before the US Soccer Federation poured millions into youth development and talent identification. When Sullivan received his call-up last week, almost nobody seemed to recall the three players who had carved their names into the record books more than three decades earlier.
Slivinski greeted the omission with dark humour. A friend had sent him a piece about Sullivan’s call-up stating that the teenager would become the second-youngest player in US history. “What am I, a ghost?” he said, laughing. “I don’t think it was a dream, I’m pretty sure I didn’t imagine the one game I played.”
When Bora Milutinovic took charge of the USMNT in 1991, he inherited a programme approaching the most pivotal moment in its history. A year earlier the United States had appeared at their first World Cup in four decades; three years later the country would host the tournament for the first time. A respectable showing on home soil was imperative. Milutinovic’s own path to the job had wandered through a dozen or so countries as a player and coach, and included leading Mexico at the 1986 World Cup and Costa Rica in 1990, guiding both to their then-best-ever finishes. His reputation as a specialist who extracted results from underperforming teams suited a US side that lacked little in grit but still fell short of the quality needed to compete with the world’s best.
He responded with a talent identification drive unprecedented for its time, calling hundreds of players into varying camps and handing nearly 50 of them their first caps across three years in charge. In August 1991 that search took him to the U-17 World Cup in Italy, where an unheralded group of American youngsters got the better of an Italy squad featuring Alessandro Del Piero and an Argentina team led by Marcelo Gallardo and Juan Sebastián Verón. The US were eventually undone by eventual champions Ghana in the semi-finals, but several players had left a mark on Milutinovic and his staff.
Among them was Slivinski, who had grown up in a trailer park in St Charles, Missouri, across the river from St Louis. Long before MLS Next Pro or elite youth travel teams that resemble professional clubs, he honed his skills at his local high school, Francis Howell North, before earning a look from US Soccer. “Those Italy players from that U-17 World Cup left and went back to training with Fiorentina,” he recalled. “I left that tournament and went right back to training with Francis Howell North.”
Vargas, Slivinski’s partner in midfield, also caught Milutinovic’s eye. Raised by a Colombian father, he was playing in Miami’s fiercely competitive Sunday leagues at 13, frequently lining up against former professionals twice his age and size. “If you’re good enough,” he says now, “you’re old enough.” Jonas, like Slivinski, was 16 and playing for his high school team, but his profile was boosted by an elite club side in Maryland, a hotbed that had produced several members of the 1990 World Cup squad. He was also part of the federation’s Olympic Developmental Program, at the time the only real pathway for a young player to stay on the senior national team’s radar.
The three arrived in North Carolina three days before the 14 September friendly against Jamaica, joining a mix of newcomers and regulars. They found themselves alongside established internationals such as Paul Caligiuri, Fernando Clavijo and Hugo Pérez, with Chris Henderson also in the group. “Just being around some of the guys from the full team, it was incredible,” Jonas said. “I remember Clavijo left a huge impression on me, he was a very hard-nosed player. It was crazy to see how everything translated; I was a kid and that was the first time I had ever played against full-grown men, the speed of everything.” Vargas put it more simply: time and space become much harder to manage against grown men, and everything happens a lot faster.
No video of the match exists, and never did, as most US friendlies of the period were not widely broadcast. None of the three even has a photograph of his time with the senior team. By most accounts, Slivinski, handed a surprise start, acquitted himself well. The US took a first-half lead through a goal by Sadri Gjonbalaj, an indoor and outdoor journeyman, and Slivinski soon made his mark: he drew a foul about 25 yards from goal and came very close to converting the resulting free kick, then broke away and forced Jamaica’s goalkeeper into another save with a shot across the face of goal. “This experience is indescribable,” he told the local paper afterwards. “It’s just a massive honour. I am thrilled, nervous and a little speechless, honestly.”
Vargas and Jonas entered in the second half and did enough to draw praise from Caligiuri and Milutinovic. The occasion, however, was almost entirely lost on the press. Soccer-specific publications such as Soccer America noted that Slivinski had become the youngest-ever US men’s player — Mia Hamm had debuted for the women at 15 in 1987 — but newspapers never mentioned it. “If it would have happened today, it would have been a big deal,” Vargas said. “But soccer in the US just wasn’t what it is now, at all, there was no social media or coverage back then. But that is what it is.”
The lack of attention was not the only thing that eluded the trio afterwards. For Jonas and Slivinski, the Jamaica match proved to be their only appearance for the United States. “I kept my jersey on after the match, I wore it back to the hotel soaking wet,” Slivinski said. “Thinking maybe they’d let me keep it. But that shows you how different a time it was.”
All three harboured dreams of future call-ups, perhaps even a place in the 1994 World Cup squad. For Slivinski, injuries derailed those ambitions, though he went on to win an NCAA championship at the University of Virginia and an MLS Cup with DC United before retiring in 2000. He never played for the national team again. “Injuries, I guess, did me in,” he says. “But I also didn’t try hard enough, I don’t think. Mentally, I just wasn’t there.”
Jonas faced his own frustrations. In 1992 he left for North Carolina State on an athletic scholarship, a move that looked sensible at the time, only to find a college coach reluctant to release him for youth national team camps. He quickly slipped off Milutinovic’s radar and into the wilds of late-1990s US minor league soccer, turning out for the Cleveland Crunch, Philadelphia KiXX and Virginia Beach Mariners. “It was frustrating,” he said. “A total grind. There were guys that were younger than me in college that I was definitely better than — they got more opportunities than I did just because of their age and the way the landscape changed. After the national team, if you weren’t getting called up any more then you were essentially on your own.”
Vargas waited three years for another US shirt, eventually featuring in a trio of late-1994 friendlies shortly before Milutinovic was forced out. He remembers incoming head coach Steve Sampson warmly, but Sampson never gave him a look. He did get one more chance to represent his country, playing for the Olympic team at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, and enjoyed a decent run in MLS with the Miami Fusion and Tampa Bay Mutiny — both of which folded not long after he retired in 2000. He also appeared on screen, playing former USMNT player John Souza in The Game of Their Lives, the dramatisation of the US’s shock win over England at the 1950 World Cup.
All three have since moved into youth coaching, giving them a particular perspective on what may await Sullivan and the other teenagers on Mauricio Pochettino’s roster for this international window. Comparing the environments, though, is difficult. “When I was Cavan’s age, that was 35 years ago,” Jonas said. “It’s good to see things changing. I am coaching in MLS Next right now; these teams are treated like national teams, practically. There’s residency, all of their expenses are taken care of, they travel in buses and planes and they’re flying together, wearing the same stuff. It’s insane, it is nothing like what we came up in. There was just no real support back then.”
Vargas, unsurprisingly, is in favour of throwing the teenager straight into the fire. “It is great that these kids get these opportunities,” he said. “This kid Cavan, he has all the tools. Why not let him test himself against the best players, the older players? The only way you learn how to deal with the fire sometimes is to get thrown into it.”