Christian Pulisic went scoreless in his final 20 Serie A matches. That's the number that will follow him from Milan's dressing room to the USMNT's World Cup camp — and it matters.
The collapse wasn't subtle. Pulisic started the season looking like a genuine Serie A force: eight goals and two assists across his opening 11 league games, with AC Milan threatening to re-enter the Champions League picture after years of underperformance. Then, somewhere around December, the goals dried up and never came back. Two assists in 20 games is what the final ledger shows. For a player who's supposed to be America's best, that's a rough way to close out the season before the biggest tournament of his life.
Milan's collapse made it worse
It wasn't just Pulisic fading — the whole team caved at the finish line. A 2-1 loss to Cagliari on the final day, combined with Como's win over Cremonese, pushed Milan to fifth place. No Champions League for the second consecutive season. Allegri was gone within days.
That context matters for how you read Pulisic's numbers. He wasn't the only one struggling, and a dysfunctional club environment rarely flatters individual attackers. But the USMNT won't get to explain that context when it counts. The form is what it is.
What makes this complicated for World Cup betting markets is that Pulisic's ceiling is still clearly elite — the first half of his Milan season proved that. The question is which version shows up at SoFi Stadium on June 12 against Paraguay. The player who ripped through defenses in October, or the one who went quiet for the entire back half of a European season.
The weight of the moment
Pulisic has 32 goals and 19 assists in 84 USMNT appearances since 2016. He dragged the Americans into the Round of 16 at the 2022 World Cup before they lost to the Netherlands. He's the most experienced player in this squad, and the USMNT's attack is built around him whether he's in form or not.
The group is manageable — Paraguay, Australia, and Turkey — and the Americans should advance. But getting deep into a home World Cup, with the country watching, will demand more than the version of Pulisic that showed up in the second half of Serie A.
He has two weeks to figure that out before it stops being a club problem and starts being a national one.
