The USMNT closed a jumbo-sized international window with a 1-0 win over Canada on Tuesday, a scruffy, scrappy match against a team whose physicality had troubled them in the recent past. It was the fourth straight win of the break, following 4-1 and 4-2 victories over Peru and Chile and a 3-0 rout of Mexico. The results alone would have made it a successful camp. What made it more notable was who was missing.
Christian Pulisic and Weston McKennie both stayed with their Italian clubs, Pulisic at Milan and McKennie at Juventus. The time away was intended either to help Pulisic get back in favor with his manager or to allow McKennie to heal an injury. Their absences did not leave the kind of hole that might once have been expected. The US looked composed and polished while reeling off four wins, and Pulisic, in particular, was barely missed. The same was true of McKennie, a load-bearing player for the national team over the past half decade.
Instead of leaning on one or two stars, the US got contributions from across the squad. Players took turns making the big play, and the burden never settled on any single player. That dynamic is the crux of the shift. For years, the US soccer community waited to be lifted to a new level by a savior: the next kid, or the one after that. The pattern has deep roots.
In 1990, then-USMNT manager Bob Gansler left three laureled veterans at home and brought a young, little-tested team to the World Cup in Italy, the USA’s first in 40 years. Gansler later recalled: ‘I was thinking not only for ’90, but I was thinking about the 90s.’ In 1998, Steve Sampson, who had lucked into the managerial job and barely clung to it going into that year’s World Cup, told the Washington Post: ‘In 10 to 15 years, we’ll win the title, there’s no doubt about it. When we Americans decide to do something, we’ll see it through.’ A sense took hold that the USMNT were the team of the future.
The modern version of that faith attached itself to players. The USMNT’s 2002 World Cup breakthrough was powered by the energy and talent of 20-year-olds Landon Donovan and DaMarcus Beasley. When those two foundered at the 2006 World Cup, Clint Dempsey emerged, and 16-year-old Freddy Adu made his national team debut that year. Dempsey outlasted Donovan and faded just as Pulisic emerged. Even as a golden-ish generation formed 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 to rebuild the team. He was expected to activate Hero Mode as he briefly had in Qatar in 2022, when he threw himself in front of a cross at the expense of a pelvic contusion and bundled in the make-or-break winner against Iran.
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. It was therefore odd, on its face, that Mauricio Pochettino would 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 were comfortably on the right side of 30. Pochettino still called in 13 debutants and eight teenagers. If results in the months after a World Cup count for anything, the decision has been vindicated.
Cavan Sullivan may well be next in line in the succession of USMNT star players, or it may be Julian Hall, Adri Mehmeti, Zavier Gozo, Justin Ellis or Mathis Albert. But there was no intimation that this was Sullivan’s team to propel under his own power, a contrast to the message Bruce Arena delivered to Pulisic after the US failed to reach the 2018 World Cup in Russia. The big takeaway from the window is that this US team may no longer be so dependent on one player, or even a small handful. If the program is entering a post-savior age, that is a clearer sign of progress than the emergence of a new prodigy, or a cluster of them. What the team and the soccer country appear to have grown instead is the kind of depth US fans used to envy in more developed soccer nations. If at the 2030 World Cup the US TV commercials do not all feature the same player, the way Pulisic largely hogged the commercial blocks this past summer, it will represent another step forward.