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Ryan O’Hanlon
Multiple Authors
At the next World Cup, everyone is going to be old. I will be. You, probably, will be. And so will the three defining players from U.S. Soccer’s most talented generation.
Christian Pulisic, Tyler Adams and Weston McKennie led the wave of young Americans who not only went to Europe as teenagers, but who almost immediately became key contributors for Champions League teams as teenagers.
They’re the ones who made the new normal the new normal: where Americans scored in the Champions League knockouts, where Americans moved for tens of millions of dollars in transfer fees, where Americans started for legendary, historic clubs. All of this was unheard of 10 years ago; now, it’s expected.
They’re the ones who stabilized the state of things after the U.S. men’s national team failure to qualify for the World Cup in 2018 — and they’re all going to be in their 30s when the next World Cup rolls around. The same goes for the likes of Antonee Robinson and Chris Richards — two more Americans who became Premier League regulars right as the Premier League’s competitiveness began to lap the rest of the world.
So, although Mauricio Pochettino is back as head coach for another cycle, this next stretch promises something new. If Pulisic and Adams and McKennie and Richards and Robinson are still the most important Americans in 2030, then something will have gone badly wrong. Pochettino’s first post-2026-World-Cup roster suggests as much with 13 uncapped players and no Pulisic, among others.
As the USMNT embarks on its new era, we are back with this season’s first edition of ESPN’s USMNT Player Performance Index, our look at how USMNT players are doing with their clubs.
How the USMNT Player Performance Index ranks Americans
The USMNT PPI is a simple system that looks at three things: talent, playing time and club quality.
Here’s a refresher on our methodology:
Talent comes from Transfermarkt’s estimated market value for every player, the best and most straightforward measure available. Playing time is the percentage of available minutes each player has played for his team in its domestic league. And team quality comes from Opta’s power rankings, which rate every professional club team in the world and offer a uniform way of assessing the quality of every U.S. player’s club team.
The rankings work off a simple premise: If you’re playing a lot of minutes and your team has a high rating, then you’re likely contributing valuable performance to your team.
Given how inefficient the global soccer market is, we still need to include the talent variable. And this early in the European season, it takes up a larger portion of the model’s input: 40% comes from market value, 35% from team rating, and 25% from playing time.
Anyone who hasn’t played this season has been omitted from the list. A bunch of the new call-ups in the latest U.S. roster missed out on our top 50 either because they don’t play for good enough MLS teams (both Red Bulls teenagers), they only started playing recently (Philadelphia’s standout 18-year-old center back Neil Pierre), or they still haven’t broken into the first team (Mathis Albert at Borussia Dortmund).
Also, given how skewed goalkeeper minutes are — you either play every minute or zero minutes — I’ve tweaked things slightly so no more than five goalkeepers (what you’d expect from a 50-player list) make the list.
Let’s get to the top 50.
1. Chris Richards, center back, Crystal Palace
The good news: He has played every minute of every Premier League game so far this season.
The bad news: Crystal Palace … might be the worst defensive team in the Premier League. They’ve conceded a league-worst 9.46 expected goals through five matches.
None of it is his fault, of course. After the departures of Marc Guéhi to Manchester City and Maxence Lacroix to Chelsea, Richards is now playing in the center of new manager Pierre Sage’s back three, and he has been the same serviceable-on-the-ball, dangerous-on-set-piece center back we’ve seen over the past couple of seasons.
Center backs do tend to age a little bit later than other outfield players, so a make-the-leap season for a 26-year-old central defender isn’t unheard of. Virgil van Dijk, after all, didn’t join Liverpool until he was 27.
Throw in his increased responsibility both along the backline and within the Palace squad, and there was at least a chance that Richards had his own breakout this season. That could still happen, but this team looks like a mess without former manager Oliver Glasner — “having Chris Richards” hasn’t been enough to prevent the defense from falling apart.
A relegation battle looks more likely than a chase for a European place.
He’s playing a lot again, and he’s getting into great positions again. But he has struggled to turn that into any production, and like Richards, he might be playing for a team that dips into the relegation places.
3. Ricardo Pepi, forward, PSV Eindhoven
Even with the injury that forced him out of the U.S. squad, he has played about 70% of the minutes for PSV so far this season. Could this be the first season in which he becomes a first-choice starter?
4. Tyler Adams, midfielder, AFC Bournemouth
Another potential relegation battler? Bournemouth have only three points and no wins, but that’s from a league-average expected-goal differential. Keep it up, and they should rise back up the table over the next couple of months.
We’ll see how this summer’s transfer saga affects his place with Monaco — how dare he not want to leave the club! — but he finally made a sub appearance right before the break. Maybe he’ll go somewhere new in January.
New AC Milan coach Ruben Amorim has some weird ideas, including, apparently, “AC Milan will be better if I bench the guy with the most goals and the most assists at the club over the past three seasons.”
My guess is that he already has been disabused of that notion, as Pulisic got his first start in Milan’s last match before the international break. He scored and led all players in xG, expected assists, expected possession value added, and touches inside the box — despite not even playing 70 total minutes.
He’s one of the best players in Serie A, and Milan are not a particularly talented team. This isn’t hard.
What is hard, maybe, is fitting Pulisic into the USMNT picture as he ages out of his prime. Although he wasn’t called up for the current window, there’s no reason to think he’s out of the picture for good. There’s some logic to it: He has more minutes on his body than any other American player ever had at his age and he could use a few weeks off.
Plus, when Pulisic is in the lineup, the gravity gets shifted toward wherever he is. Without him there and with a bunch of new, young faces on the roster, Pochettino will learn a bit more about how to — and who can — fill the void now and in four years.
7. Malik Tillman, midfielder, Bayer Leverkusen
Not ideal: Although healthy, he didn’t play in Leverkusen’s most recent match, a 2-0 win over RB Leipzig.
8. Sergiño Dest, fullback, PSV Eindhoven
He has played every minute of every match so far this season and was named in the Champions League Team of the Week for Matchday 1. Also, he’s still, somehow, only 25.
It took only seven seasons, but McKennie finally doesn’t have to spend the first two months of the season convincing a skeptical Juventus manager that he, inevitably, is going to become a play-every-minute-of-every-important-game starter. Nope, Luciano Spalletti already gets it.
10. Timothy Weah, defender, Olympique Marseille
He’s the 26-year-old captain of Marseille, and he’s not getting called up to the USMNT. We live in wild times.
12. Yunus Musah, midfielder, AC Milan
Development isn’t linear. Just follow this path.
As a 19-year-old, Musah started every game at the 2022 World Cup, and played more minutes than all but four other Americans. He moved to AC Milan the following summer — when they were briefly being run by Billy Beane (yes, that Billy Beane) and his savvy staff. Musah played 30 games in his first season in Milan, then 29 the next, then one.
He was loaned to Atalanta last season but started only four matches and played under 600 minutes. Not only did Musah not make the World Cup roster — Musah hasn’t played for the U.S. since March 2025.
Well, he’s still only 23 and has already played 330 minutes for Amorim’s Milan this season. He has started three and played in all five Serie A matches. And now, he’s back with the USMNT for the next set of friendlies.
He’s playing a weird role in Milan because Amorim is, well, a weird coach. After averaging around 18 touches in the attacking third in his first three seasons in Italy, Musah hastaken nine touches in the attacking third per game so far this season. Maybe you need to go backward to go forward — or something.
13. Johnny Cardoso, midfielder, Atlético de Madrid
14. Mark McKenzie, center back, Toulouse
15. Aidan Morris, midfielder, Middlesbrough
16. Alex Freeman, fullback, Villarreal CF
After bouncing in and out of the lineup over the first month of the season, he went a full 90 in each of Villarreal‘s past two matches, a pair of 3-1 wins.
He has to be close to a call-up, right?
At 21, he has played every minute of every Bundesliga game for a surprisingly competitive Paderborn side.
He’s first in expected assists and fourth in expected goals for the team with the second-best xG differential in the Championship. And none of that is juiced up by set pieces. Berhalter is on a heater.
20. George Bello, defender, LASK Linz
22. Tristan Blackmon, defender, Vancouver Whitecaps
23. Giovanni Reyna, midfielder, RC Strasbourg
It’s only September, and he already has started four league matches. The last time he featured in more, across a full campaign, was 2021-22.
He’s actually playing soccer, finally. This is progress!
24. Brian White, forward, Vancouver Whitecaps
25. Nathan Harriel, defender, Philadelphia Union
26. Cole Campbell, winger, SV 07 Elversberg
He scored a nice goal in a win over Tillman’s Leverkusen, and he has started all four Bundesliga matches. Other than that, though, he hasn’t done all that much — no quality shots, no quality chances created — but he’s still only 20.
27. Tate Johnson, defender, Vancouver Whitecaps
28. Milan Iloski, forward, Philadelphia Union
29. Brian Schwake, goalkeeper, Nashville SC
30. Joe Scally, defender, Borussia Mönchengladbach
31. Cavan Sullivan, midfielder, Philadelphia Union
Not only does Sullivan look like maybe the greatest American prospect of all time — analyst Matt Doyle ranked him third here — but I’m pretty sure he should’ve been on the World Cup roster? And not only on the roster, but he probably should’ve played a lot? Maybe he should’ve even … started?
No one was asking these questions before or even in the immediate aftermath of the tournament, but Sullivan has genuinely been one of the best players in MLS since the World Cup break ended. Not, like, “good for a teenager” but like “good for a league that also features Lionel Messi, Luis Suárez, Robert Lewandowski, Antoine Griezmann, and Son Heung-Min.”
Based on the ratings from the stats app Futi — essentially, how much a player has increased his team’s goal differential, interpreted on a 0-100 scale — only 15 players have been better than Sullivan so far this season. More impressive still is that he rates out as above average in every phase of the game: shooting, creating, receiving, buildup play, and ball-winning.
Even more impressive: That’s for the whole season. Since the World Cup, he has been even better: fourth in the league for non-penalty xG and sixth for expected possession value added, per Stats Perform. He won’t be able to rent a car in Pennsylvania until after the 2030 World Cup, and he’s already playing like one of the truly elite players in a league where, as analyst Michael Caley recently put it, the average team is better than the average team in Portugal or the Netherlands. This almost never happens.
The big questions are the big questions for any 16-year-old: What will happen to his body and his brain? I’m not going to speculate on that. Instead, I’ll just say that the hype is warranted — and might even be even underrating him. U.S. fans should be excited, and so should Manchester City fans.
32. Dante Polvara, defender, St. Louis City
33. Daniel Edelman, midfielder, St. Louis City
34. Shaq Moore, defender, FC Dallas
35. Chris Brady, goalkeeper, Chicago Fire
36. George Campbell, defender, West Bromwich Albion
39. Marlon Fossey, defender, Standard Liège
40. Zavier Gozo, winger, Crystal Palace
It’s not just Cavan Sullivan. OK, fine, it is just Cavan Sullivan. He alone is as good as he has been and as young as he is. But beyond him, the average age of the current U.S. roster is right around 22, and the 13 uncapped players average out to about 19.5 years of age.
Gozo is already getting sub minutes for Palace as a teenager after leaving MLS over the summer. And there are so many other prospect-age players still in MLS who are already contributing at a high level.
Among the new players called up, Sullivan, Frankie Westfield, Justin Ellis, Neil Pierre, Peyton Miller and Adri Mehmeti are all 20-and-under and all already rate out as above-average MLS players, per the Futi model. That’s not even mentioning 18-year-old Julian Hall, who gets dinged by Futi’s all-around model but who is fifth — fifth! — in the league in expected goals.
A bunch of these players missed out on the list, but that has more to do with the competitive and financial balance of MLS than anything else. More young Americans have played minutes this season than in any other MLS season on record. And we’re only through September:
That’s not a sea change. It’s a tsunami — and it can only be a good thing for the USMNT.
41. Daniel Aguirre, defender, CD Guadalajara
42. Max Arfsten, fullback, Middlesbrough
He’s playing as a genuine left back, and he’s second only to Berhalter in expected assists. We’ve reached a point where a guy who played one total minute at the World Cup is good enough to start — and produce — for one of the best teams in the Championship.
43. Paxten Aaronson, midfielder, Colorado Rapids
44. Tanner Tessmann, midfielder, Olympique Lyon
Earlier this year, it seemed as if Tessman would be starting at the World Cup and getting a pay raise from a move to a richer club. Then, he was left off the roster, and now he’s struggling for bench minutes at Lyon. Career trajectories rarely keep moving in the same direction.
47. Roman Celentano, goalkeeper, FC Cincinnati
49. Matt Turner, goalkeeper, New England Revolution
