The comparisons to Freddy Adu should be enough to make everyone slow down. They won't be, of course — they never are — but they should.
Cavan Sullivan is 16 years old, already has 46 MLS appearances for the Philadelphia Union, and has a pre-arranged move to Manchester City waiting for him when he turns 18. Seven goals. Seven assists. The youngest player to ever debut in MLS. The hype is real, and so is the talent. But so is the very American tendency to anoint players before they're ready to carry the weight.
Tim Howard and Landon Donovan are pushing for Sullivan to get senior USMNT minutes sooner rather than later. That's a familiar refrain. The program has heard it before — about Adu, about Reyna, about Pulisic to a lesser extent — and the results have ranged from disappointing to outright damaging to a player's development.
The Olympic pathway makes more sense right now
Sullivan isn't the most ready young American in the pipeline. That distinction belongs to Zavier Gozo, 19, who is already making an impression at Crystal Palace in the Premier League and looks genuinely primed for a senior call-up in the September/October camp. Sullivan, by contrast, is four goals and three assists into his 2026 MLS season as Philadelphia fights for an Eastern Conference playoff spot. He's good. He's not ready to displace anyone from Mauricio Pochettino's senior setup.
Steve Cherundolo's U-23 Olympic squad is the right environment. The 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles would be a natural stage for Sullivan to lead — surrounded by players like Adri Mehmeti, Julian Hall, and Justin Ellis, who are all on similar developmental trajectories. Valuable minutes in a competitive but appropriately leveled tournament beats token senior caps that achieve little beyond the PR moment.
The player Sullivan would theoretically be pushing out of the senior picture is Christian Pulisic — still at AC Milan, still central to their rebuild, and, by any honest measure, the best American player of this generation. Treating them as an either/or choice is exactly the kind of short-term thinking that has hurt this program repeatedly. Pulisic at 16 was arguably more developed than Sullivan is now. That's not a criticism of Sullivan. It's context that gets routinely ignored when the marketing machine needs a new face.
Sullivan's competition is already stacked
Even setting Pulisic aside, the path to regular USMNT minutes for Sullivan is not straightforward. In the central midfield areas where he's spent most of his youth national team career, Weston McKennie, Tyler Adams, Johnny Cardoso, and Aidan Morris are all ahead of him. Gianluca Busio has performed well at club level and deserves another look. On the wings, Gozo is emerging and Malik Tillman is coming off some of his strongest performances for the U.S. at the World Cup.
Sullivan will get his chance. The 2030 World Cup shapes up as a realistic window where he could arrive as a genuine difference-maker rather than a teenager being asked to shoulder expectations no 17 or 18-year-old should carry. Anyone taking long odds on Sullivan's senior breakthrough before then is betting against history — and against the better instincts the program has only occasionally managed to show.
Let the kid play for Philadelphia. Let Cherundolo develop him with the Olympic group. The USMNT will still be there when he's ready for it.
