Is the USMNT finally over its savior complex?

American football has a habit of pinning its hopes on one man at a time. The Guardian's Leander Schaerlaeckens frames it as a savior complex, a cycle where the national team's fortunes rise and fall with whichever generational talent happens to be wearing the armband. For most of the last decade, that's been Christian Pulisic: 90 caps, 33 international goals, the face of the program since he was a teenager at Borussia Dortmund.

But according to the Guardian, recent USMNT performances without Pulisic available have produced good results, and that's the detail reshaping the conversation around Pochettino's side. The exact circumstances behind his absence, whether rest, rotation or something else, aren't laid out in the reporting, and Flagside isn't going to guess. What matters is the response: the team kept functioning.

A history of needing one man

The comparison the Guardian draws is to Bob Gansler, the coach who picked a USMNT squad for the 1990 World Cup that leaned heavily on specific individual talents rather than a deep, interchangeable pool. That tournament is remembered as a reference point for how thin American depth used to be: take out the headline names and there wasn't much tactical identity left underneath.

Pulisic has spent his career carrying some version of that weight. Since his €64m move from Dortmund to Chelsea in January 2019, he's been the player opposition scouting reports start with. At AC Milan, in the seasons we have on record, he's posted 15 goals and 11 assists in 2023/24 and 15 goals with 12 assists in 2024/25, output that explains why his absence from a USMNT XI has historically felt like a structural problem rather than a lineup tweak.

What Pochettino's version looks like

The suggestion from the Guardian's reporting is that this USMNT doesn't collapse into the same hole when Pulisic isn't on the pitch. That's the headline claim worth testing over the next cycle rather than declaring settled off one stretch of results. A team that can win without its best player available isn't just lucky, it's usually a sign the manager has built roles that survive one absence, which is a different thing to the Gansler-era squads the Guardian uses as the historical low bar.

None of this writes Pulisic out of the picture. At 28, still at Milan as of the most recent snapshot, with a market value of €40m recorded in May 2026, he remains the USMNT's most accomplished individual by a distance. The point isn't that he's being replaced. It's that, for the first time in a while, the team doesn't look like it falls apart the moment he isn't there.

The actual test is still coming

Good results without your best attacker are a promising sign, not proof of a finished philosophy. The real examination of whether Pochettino has genuinely moved the USMNT past its one-man dependency will come at a World Cup, not in whichever fixtures produced this run of form. Until then, the fairest read is that the ceiling hasn't dropped with Pulisic out, and for a program with this particular history, that alone is new.