Christian Pulisic snapped a six-month goal drought against Senegal last Sunday, dropped to his knees, and roared. Not because he'd been scared. Because he'd always known it was coming.
That self-certainty is either the mark of someone who genuinely understands their own game — or a useful fiction players tell themselves to survive the noise. With Pulisic, it appears to be the former. He ended 2024 by scoring eight goals in four months for AC Milan, then went quiet, and an entire nation apparently forgot the eight goals had happened.
The drought was never the story
Pulisic has been playing top-level football since his mid-teens — Borussia Dortmund, Chelsea, Champions League winner in 2021, now a Serie A regular at Milan. Any career that long will have dry spells. The fixation on this one existed almost entirely because the 2026 World Cup is six weeks away and it's on American soil, which means every Pulisic misfire gets filtered through existential dread rather than basic context.
He knew that, too. "I went through a run right before this where I couldn't stop scoring," he said. "That's just kind of how it goes." His method for riding it out: don't reinvent the wheel, lean on your support system, resist overthinking. Simple advice. Harder in practice when half the country is projecting its World Cup anxiety onto your goal tally.
The USMNT open against Paraguay at SoFi Stadium on June 12, and Pulisic is their most recognizable attacking threat. Whether that means he performs or gets suffocated by expectation is the real question. His Champions League pedigree and Serie A experience suggest he's built for the occasion — players who've performed in knockout European football don't usually crumble on big nights.
What he actually said about the World Cup
He's not setting scorelines or round targets. "I just want to be able to look back on it whenever it's done and have zero regrets," he said. Which sounds humble, but also tracks with someone who's been in enough big matches to know how quickly tournament football can go sideways regardless of quality.
On this squad specifically: "I played with some of the guys since I was 13, 14 years old... It feels like a big family." Team cohesion tends to get dismissed as a soft metric until it isn't — tournament football is won on margins, and a group that's been building together for years has a foundation most nations at this stage don't.
- USMNT open vs Paraguay — June 12, SoFi Stadium, Los Angeles
- Pulisic scored eight Serie A goals for Milan before his six-month drought
- Drought ended with a goal and assist vs Senegal in a pre-tournament friendly
- Won the UEFA Champions League with Chelsea in 2021
- 2026 is his second World Cup — Qatar 2022 was his first
Backing the USMNT to progress from their group suddenly looks a lot more interesting now that their main attacking player has rediscovered his range at precisely the right moment. Whether Pulisic can carry them past the round of 16 — which is roughly where the real questions start — is another matter entirely.
"I just feel like a kid who has this dream, and it's right in front of me here." He grew up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, smelling chocolate from his front door. Now there's a limited-edition Hershey's bar with his name on it and a World Cup in his backyard. He's earned that much, at least.
