Chelsea’s own Captain America: What’s next for Christian Pulisic?
The good and the bad
Pulisic is the kind of player who gets fans off their seats, an athlete you would buy a ticket to watch live in a packed stadium. That is, whenever that opportunity presents itself again. The talent is there for all to see. It is that talent that has made him the poster boy of the USA’s Golden Generation.
The American is not a traditional winger, which means that he will not hug the sideline and stretch play or go down to the byline and pull a cross back for an onrushing attacker. Rather, he goes at defenders head-on and often beats them with his sheer pace. His nimble footwork allows him to get out of tight spaces quite easily, if not gracefully. He is not Hazard 2.0 in that regard; Pulisic’s brand is very much his own.
Risk and reward are not proportional in football, which means that Pulisic’s directness is not compensated duly every match. He is sometimes lost with his dribbling and reckless with his passing, but has the awareness and the determination to win the ball back high up the pitch. The American’s finishing is split: he is prolific at times but wasteful otherwise. Given that he has modeled his game to arrive at the right place at the right time, some additional work on his finishing could take it to an elite level.
A statistical deep dive into Pulisic confirms much of what we know; on his day, he can be a dangerous player, but those days are rare. Injuries can be attributed to the same. Pulisic played fewer than 2,500 minutes in the 2020/21 season and made just 25 starts. His share of minutes stood at 48 percent, which means that he was involved in less than half of the total minutes his team played, fbref suggests.
Despite playing more minutes last season than in 2019/20, Pulisic’s output actually dropped. He scored six times as compared to 11 in his debut season and provided three fewer assists. He underperformed his expected goals tally (7.8), which also dropped compared to his first season in England. The uncertainty at the club could perhaps account for some of that, but the decline in his production is clear.
Players endure difficult seasons and, more often than not, emerge as their better selves at the end of it. Chelsea will expect the same from Pulisic. The American has surely earned one more year at the club thanks to his flashes of brilliance. However, another season of decline could prompt the Blues to search for replacements. Unlike his country, his team’s hopes and dreams don’t begin—and end—with the youngster.