USMNT: Christian Pulisic now facing the perfect challenge

Christian Pulisic scored again for Chelsea on Saturday to secure the win for the Blues. The USMNT star, though, now faces the perfect challenge: reliability.

At some point in a young footballer’s career, the expectations change. As a burgeoning teenager with blistering talent and terrific prospects, fleeting glimpses of your ability, brief but inconsistent moments are enough. The regularity of performance will come.

But as you progress from gifted young prospect to first-team option and eventually weekly starter, the demands on your influence evolve. No longer are brief moments enough. You must provide consistency, dependability, a predictability to your play that means that you can be counted on every time you take to the pitch. In a word, you must be reliable.

This process of evolution has caught out hundreds of brilliant young players. The transition from youth football to reserve football to high-end senior football is brutally difficult. Most do not adapt well.

U.S. Men’s National Team star and the most talented American player to ever take to the world stage, Christian Pulisic, is now at the end of this process. He developed at Borussia Dortmund, broke into their first-team rotations as a teenager, began to force his way into the starting XI with semi-regularity, before losing his place and being sold in a big-money move to Chelsea, to essentially replace Eden Hazard.

At Dortmund, Pulisic was never expected to be reliable. It was advantageous if he was, of course, but there was also an acceptance that, sometimes, he might not play as well as he is capable of. Inconsistency is natural for young players.

But that is not the same at Chelsea. Pulisic has been signed to be a key starter in Frank Lampard’s young, effervescent team. And that means that he must produce like one, not just as a fleeting component of a squad; he must be the attacking cornerstone, the individual around which the whole team revolves. This is a new challenge.

Pulisic scored his fourth Premier League goal of the season in Saturday’s 2-1 win over Watford. After the match, Lampard extolled his goal-getting attitude, praising his intent, application and production of seemingly simple goals:

"“I love that Christian scored a goal from four yards out. He could have decided not to go the extra mile and that ball flashes across the face and no one gets on the end of it. If he continues doing that sort of thing then the goals will rack up. His general performance was top as well.”"

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After a brilliant hat-trick the week prior, this was the perfect follow-up performance from Pulisic. He might not have lit up the Watford defence like he did Burnley’s, but that he showed his ability to score simple goals helps to illustrate that he can now be a reliable proponent of the Chelsea attack, someone who Lampard can lean on on a weekly basis, not just when he is feeling it.

In all competitions, Pulisic now has four goals and five assists. He has only played 744 minutes. A direct goal involvement every 82.66 minutes is a sensational rate, comparable to some of the very best players in the world — for comparison’s sake, in the Premier League, Raheem Sterling has a direct involvement in a goal every 110.25 minutes.

This is now the next step for Pulisic: to stride out of the protective shadows of youthful talent and into the expectations of being a regular first-team starter. This is new ground, and it is the perfect test as he looks to establish himself as a leading star in the USMNT and world football alike.

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World-class players are not world-class because of their ability to produce brilliant moments; they are world-class because of how often they can produce brilliant moments. Many footballers are capable of great things on a football pitch, but very few can be reliably expected to produce as such time and time again. That is what Pulisic must now replicate. He must become reliable. And if he does, for the first time in their history, the USMNT could have a genuine elite player in their midst.

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