Christian Pulisic is probably too talented to be kept off of Team USA in the 2030 FIFA World Cup. But it might take until then for the underachieving striker’s reputation to recover from the beating he’s taking across sports media following the USMNT’s 4-1 loss to Belgium on Monday night.
Unlike previous men’s national teams—which largely shared media blame after an early World Cup exit—Pulisic is seemingly being panned as the sole scapegoat for Team USA’s embarrassing round of 16 loss.
The criticism fired at Pulisic has been withering and personal. It’s not just that the 27-year-old came up small, along with the rest of the U.S. side, on the world stage—his teammates did, too. It’s that Pulisic is being ripped as a quitter with no heart; a soft, pampered prima donna who doesn’t have the guts to live up to his “Captain America” nickname.
Yes, there’s the uproar by disappointed Team USA fans who thought we finally had a side that could go toe-to-toe with Lionel Messi’s Argentina or Kylian Mbappe and France. But the worst part for Pulisic’s gold-plated brand is the pummeling he’s getting from pillars of the soccer community.
Women’s soccer legend turned Fox Sports analyst Carli Lloyd landed a one-two punch reminiscent of Muhammad Ali. After Monday night’s loss, Lloyd singled out Pulisic as one of the primary “big-time players” who shrank from the moment.
“I’ve got to be honest; I was a bit disappointed with Christian Pulisic,” Lloyd said on Fox’s post-match show. “I think whether he wants to be the star of this team or not, we didn’t see enough from him in this particular game, and really the whole World Cup.”
Pulisic’s diffident attitude isn’t helping either. The sports media adores players who overcome physical adversity. Think a flu-ridden Michael Jordan willing the Bulls to victory over the Jazz in the 1998 NBA Finals. Or a limping Tiger Woods gamely winning the 2008 U.S. Open on a broken leg.
Pulisic played hurt on Monday night, too. But nobody seemed to think it was that serious or really cared. When an embarrassing post-match clip surfaced showing Pulisic gratefully noting he could “rest” his sprained ankle, Lloyd pounced again.
“You rest when your playing career is over. Period,” she wrote contemptuously on X/Twitter. Her tweet has drawn 66,000 likes and over 5 million views.
Pulisic wasn’t getting any sympathy either from men’s soccer legends who all but questioned his manhood. On his Unfiltered Soccer podcast with Tim Howard, former USMNT captain Landon Donovan was still reeling from Pulisic removing himself from the biggest match of his life. When he took a similar media beating after a disappointing 2006 World Cup, a devastated Donovan said he fell into a depression.
“This was a game where you needed him to go, ‘Give me the ball, I’m gonna stick it in the back of the net, it’s 2-2, let’s go.’ And he just didn’t. And he wasn’t even close to it,” Donovan said. “In fact, there’s reporting that he asked to get subbed out of the game. I can’t confirm that, so I don’t know if that’s true or not. But the reality is, he came out of a World Cup knockout game, at home, with his leg still intact.
“I’m saying this to you Tim, and you know it because you played with me, you would have had to fucking drag me off the field. And I would have punched the doctor in the face and said, ‘You’re not taking me off the field. Put whatever you need to put in me, and I’m staying on the field.’”
Pulisic hauls in an estimated $20 million annually from sponsors such as Puma, Volkswagen, and Hershey’s in his hometown of Hershey, Pa. But Pulisic’s frosty attitude could hurt his career business-wise, warned Donovan. Because it’s more than fans who are upset with the crown prince of American soccer. Pulisic needs “media training,” according to Donovan. He needs to “man up,” change his life, and confront the hangers-on micro-managing his brand.
“I speak to people who are at U.S. Soccer. I speak to his sponsors. I speak to his teammates. I speak to the staff and the coaches. People are fed up with the way things are handled around him,” Donovan said. “And it’s not necessarily him, but it’s his agents, his family, his hangers-on, the people who are influencing. People are fed up with it. They treat people poorly. They do things poorly. It’s always a ‘No’ when you ask for an interview.”
Meanwhile, Howard damned the AC Milan forward with faint praise, describing him as a “nice footballer.” There’s a “dark side” to sports fame and celebrity, the former Team USA goalkeeper warned. If Pulisic wants the fame and money that come with being the face of American soccer, he’d better be able to handle the criticism if he disappoints the country.
“I hope for his sake he’s not on social media for the foreseeable future,” noted Howard. “He deserves a rest.”
The anti-Pulisic drumbeat from former U.S. soccer stars only increased on Wednesday. Apple TV soccer analyst Taylor Twellman told Barstool Sports that Pulisic doesn’t want to be “that guy.” Instead, he thrives as a supporting player rather than the star with the focus on him. Twellman questioned whether his breakup with his long-time girlfriend this year hurt his play. “This one’s weird,” he said.
Of course, it’s easy to play armchair quarterback and insist that a banged-up Pulisic should have carried Team USA to victory—or at least to a respectable showing against a country of fewer than 12 million people. As several pointed out on social media, none of the male former Team USA legends ripping him this week won the World Cup either. So when it comes to bashing Pulisic, Donovan, Howard, and Twellman can have their cake and eat it too.
Like all pro sports, global soccer is a closed fraternity with its own deep-seated resentments and rivalries. Much of the anti-Pulisic sentiment seems to have been building for years, just waiting for a match. His no-show performance on Monday night finally gave critics an opening to go public.
There also appears to be more than a little score-settling in the Pulisic pile-on. After all, a year before he disappeared on the pitch in Seattle, he fired a preemptive strike at former national men’s team players in the Pulisic documentary for Paramount+.
“I’d say the most annoying thing, and for me, the biggest cop-out of all time, is when, especially, you know, all pundits want to say: ‘They didn’t want it. They didn’t have the heart, you know, back in our day, we would fight and we would die on that field,’” said Pulisic.
Who says Pulisic needs media training? A year ago, he accurately saw where his story was heading if he didn’t show up big at the first World Cup on U.S. soil in 32 years. Now, as Donovan said, the receipts are coming due.
Still, an image cleanup from Team Pulisic may already be underway. On Wednesday, he posted a positive message on Instagram thanking fans for their support. “I wanted to deliver so much more,” he wrote.
Your critics finally agree, Christian.
