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Deep into the third and most recent episode of the Paramount+ docuseries on Milan and United States men’s national team star Christian Pulisic – with the very does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin title of Pulisic – a remarkable sight unfolds: Pulisic, coaxed by his girlfriend, reveals something of himself.
In that scene, Pulisic and Alexa Melton, a golfer on the second-tier Epson Tour, sit at a table in his house in Italy playing a card game. He looks uncomfortable. “What feelings are hard for you to communicate to me and how can I make it easier?” Melton asks, reading off a card.
His eyes get big. He thinks about this for a beat.
“All of them!” Pulisic responds.
“Why?” she demands to know.
He grimaces. Stutters.
“Because I’m not good at sharing my feelings.”
“Why not?” she tries again.
Pulisic grows more unsettled, cupping his face with his hands.
“You know this!” he finally protests.
Pulisic, we learn, isn’t just introverted. He apparently has great difficulty relating his emotions to anyone at all.
By this point in the episode, Pulisic has disclosed that, at age 26, Melton was his first serious girlfriend. It hadn’t occurred to him to find a partner any earlier, he says, so busy was he pursuing his soccer career. This purported celibacy dragged on for so long, he recalls, that it drew questions about his sexuality from those closest to him. But Melton, having duly fallen for him when he slid into her Instagram DMs – “Hi,” he ventured, irresistibly; “Hey,” she responded with studious coyness – has begun to crack open Pulisic’s hard shell. Or so say the various friends, family members and assorted soccer stars quoted at length on this subject.
All of which is to say: The documseries Pulisic is a strange artifact, slated to run for six more how-on-earth-will-they-fill-these episodes. One of the first subjects it explores is how improbable the series’ existence is in the first place, what with the subject’s disinterest in taking part in it. “What kinda content are you gonna get for this thing?” a bemused Clint Dempsey wonders to the camera at one point. Good question.
It is well established by now that Pulisic is deeply private, yet going by all available evidence, he also lives an uncomplicated life. (When he did the briefly-viral “Trump dance” after scoring against Jamaica in November, he seemed genuinely bewildered that anybody should see it as political.)
Pulisic himself more or less confesses that he feels obliged to do the series, kicking things off with a rather ominous disclaimer.
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“There’s really two parts of being a professional soccer player for me,” Pulisic announces. “There’s the side of what I’m doing on the field. And, for me, everything else I do is private.”
And with that, viewers, let’s dive in!
There’s a digression on anti-American bias in European soccer. All the Americans believe it exists. Milan legend and current senior advisor Zlatan Ibrahimović, who has commanded Pulisic to be more public, has clearly never heard about this before he’s asked and thinks it doesn’t.
Then there’s the long and oddly aggressive diatribe about how unfair Fifa’s “article 19” supposedly is for forbidding the international transfers of minors, therefore keeping underaged, single-passport Americans out of Europe’s elite footballing academies. Never mind that the rule was instituted to combat the human trafficking of children from destitute regions under the guise of talent development.
The hardier viewer is rewarded with one more rare sighting: a peek at Pulisic’s quick wit, which his teammates have long insisted exists, but which is rarely spotted in the wild. “How does it feel to date a great golfer?” Melton asks Pulisic, himself an avid golfer, as they stroll between holes on a course. “I don’t know,” he deadpans. “You tell me.”
In giving us even a few glances at his life – the instantaneous maelstrom of admirers that envelops him whenever he ventures into Milan, for instance – Pulisic unwittingly illustrates how little his national team peers have shared of theirs. It is an inconvenient quirk of this gilded-if-not-yet-golden generation of the USMNT that it contains personalities who are interesting and engaging in private – Weston McKennie and Antonee Robinson, for instance – whoa are also seemingly unmotivated to be any more public than is strictly necessary. Much of this team sees doing media as an imposition, rather than an opportunity.
That stands in stark contrast to previous generations. The men’s national teams of the 1980s, ’90s and early 2000s would do just about anything to garner some attention for their sport and themselves, understanding innately that their economic survival depended on it. The 1980s star Rick Davis did any TV hit or clinic he could, no matter how obscure, to bang the drum for his sport. The 1990 World Cup team danced bare-chested on a beach. The 90s goalkeeper Tony Meola parlayed his soccer fame into an acting job in an off-Broadway play and a tryout as a kicker with the New York Jets. His teammate Alexi Lalas fashioned a musical career from his soccer fame, touring Europe with Hootie & The Blowfish. A certain water fountain-based photoshoot in 2002 remains the legendary residue of a willingness to agree to anything at all.
No such self-promotional streak runs through today’s generation. Perhaps that’s because so many of these national teamers landed in Europe as teenagers, where they were imbued with the notion that the media are best kept at a remove. You might argue that this is an age where social media and athlete-owned production companies have removed the need to speak to fans through the press, but these players aren’t particularly active on those platforms. When they do engage, it is mostly in practiced and highly polished soundbites, and often in controlled environments.
Maybe the brand, such as it is, has been built, and the players sense innately that no amount of interviews or late-night talkshow appearances will move the needle for their sport any longer. Anybody who cares to know is probably familiar with them at this point.
Whatever the case, there doesn’t seem to be the same zeal to push the promotional boulder up the hill any longer. Take it as a sign of growth, perhaps. Or maybe see it as a bet by this team that it isn’t worth making much of an effort beyond the occasional participation in the sportsdoc-industrial complex. That their stars will rise purely under the power of their performance. That they are better off focusing all their efforts on their game itself.
Still, this is curious inasmuch as Pulisic, and several fellow national team stars, have on more than one occasion proclaimed their outsized ambitions for soccer. They want it to become the nation’s leading sport. They want to create still more opportunities for the next generation, as their own predecessors enabled them. Legacy is something that seems to be on their minds a lot.
There is no formula for reconciling these seemingly conflicting desires for privacy and cultural supremacy. The apparent calculation being made is that if the Americans go on a deep run at the World Cup (mostly) on home soil in 2026, all the rest will follow.
Leander Schaerlaeckens is at work on a book about the United States men’s national soccer team, out in 2026. He teaches at Marist College.
