Even with Coppa Italia loss, Christian Pulisic has had the best-ever season by an American in Europe

https://www.theguardian.com/football/2025/may/15/christian-pulisic-usmnt-best-season-europe

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Milan is one of the world’s most iconic clubs, and Pulisic’s performance has been a bright spot in a disappointing season

If AC Milan didn’t redeem their lost season in the Coppa Italia final against Bologna on Wednesday, it was no fault of Christian Pulisic’s.

As his teammates failed to grind down their tightly packed opponents in a 1-0 loss, owing to Dan Ndoye’s second-half goal, the American did all he could, just as he has all season, toiling and pressing and charging after balls hopeful and hopeless alike.

Airborne, he nearly connected with a loose ball on Bologna’s goal line early on. He was dragged down on breakaways several times. Frustrated by his team’s inability to get anything going, he tried charging through Bologna’s back line all by himself at one point, coming a few steps short of willing his team to an equalizer and perhaps a trophy.

He’s made a difference playing that way again and again for the club that saved him from Chelsea’s overstuffed squad in the summer of 2023. Facing the same opponent at home at the San Siro on the previous Friday, Pulisic assisted on Milan’s equalizer by Santi Giménez and scored the winner himself in a 3-1 victory that lifted the club back to eighth place in Serie A. That assist, his ninth, brought him to within one of the league’s leader in the category, Romelu Lukaku.

It all begs the question whether any American has ever had a better European club season.

Quietly, some of Pulisic’s United States men’s national team contemporaries have also put together impressive ‘24/25 campaigns. Once he was finally healthy and a regular at the base of Bournemouth’s midfield, Tyler Adams’ 3.93 tackles per 90 minutes put him in the 99th percentile of all midfielders in Europe’s five biggest domestic leagues, the Champions League and the Europa League, per FBRef.com. His 1.61 interceptions put him in the 91st percentile.

In central defense for Crystal Palace, Chris Richards has amassed 1.82 blocks per 90, good for the 93rd percentile in Europe’s top circuits. Ricardo Pepi led the Dutch Eredivisie in scoring for PSV Eindhoven before going down with a season-ending knee injury in January. Over at Juventus, Weston McKennie overcame yet another summer spent ostracized by the club by not only fighting his way back into the team but, as if to emphasize the point, captaining La Vecchia Signora several times.

But Pulisic has compiled a truly remarkable campaign. Going into Wednesday’s final, he had already posted a career-high 17 goals and 10 assists in all competitions. Presently, he is also on pace to set career highs in expected goals, expected assisted goals, progressive passes, goals + assists per 90 minutes, shots on target, shot-on-target percentage and, at the same time, average shot distance. Pulisic added .46 to Milan’s team xG whenever he was on the field, narrowly beating last year’s career high. (By comparison in Pulisic’s last three seasons at Chelsea, his On-Off xG number was negative.)

Perhaps more meaningfully to the Milanisti, Pulisic scored on a long, daring dribble against rivals Inter Milan in the Derby della Madonnina.

Making comparisons between players in different positions, leagues and eras can be a fool’s errand. Aside from the discrepancy in conditions and the fact that any two humans behave and perform differently even if you somehow manage to equalize every other discrete variable, the trouble is that almost no statistically and mathematically meaningful comparison can be done here. That’s because the other contenders played back in the stone age of soccer, crawling out of the primordial ooze of the 2000s and 2010s when analytics weren’t really a thing yet.

Still, it’s hard to make a case that any American has had a better season in Europe than Pulisic.

With all that said, the closest competitor for this prize that we made up and will award, by necessity, purely on vibes is probably Clint Dempsey’s final season at Fulham in 2011-12, before earning a transfer to Tottenham Hotspur. That year, Dempsey scored 18 league and European goals and collected seven assists, making him the club’s top scorer and player of the season for a second year in a row.

There are a few other contenders of note. Tim Howard was voted into the PFA Team of the Year for Manchester United in 2003-04, although he lost the starting job the next season and was clearly a more polished goalkeeper a decade later. Brad Friedel had earned that same honor a year earlier, when he also led the Premier League in clean sheets as Blackburn Rovers placed an impressive sixth.

Jozy Altidore burned brightest at age 22 in his second season with AZ Alkmaar, bagging 23 goals in 2012-13, albeit in a league were goals tend to come fairly cheaply. That was probably also Michael Bradley’s most memorable season, his first at AS Roma, when he was a regular and the best holding midfielder the US had produced to that point.

But no American has looked quite so imperious, so entirely at home and validated in a leading role for a seven-time European champion. Christian Pulisic is one of AC Milan’s best players, wearing the number 11 once donned by Zlatan Ibrahimović, Rivaldo, Roberto Donadoni, Jean-Pierre Papin, Dejan Savićević, Brian Laudrup and Gianni Rivera.

It fits him just fine.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is at work on a book about the United States men’s national soccer team, out in 2026. He teaches at Marist University.