Concacaf Puts Stars Like Pulisic, Davies In Impossible Position

After the news this week that Christian Pulisic will forgo playing for the U.S. men’s national team this June in friendlies and then the 2025 Concacaf Gold Cup, the American soccer universe has been flooded with a barage of polarized opinions.

The majority suggest Pulisic risks doing damage to the USMNT’s mentality and cohesion by passing on the last competitive event before next year’s World Cup. A smaller but considerable minority suggest taking a breather now is worth it if it will result in better a year from now.

And predictably, most ignore the real problem: Concacaf’s unrelenting competitive calendar that manufactures high-stakes semifinals and finals for its biggest programs, and gives European stars like Pulisic, Canada’s Alphonso Davies and others an a string of impossible decisions.

It’s not the number of total games Concacaf asks of its teams, but rather the number that are assessed a high level of urgency by virtue of being late-round knockout contests. In a federation as unbalanced as Concacaf, it’s an extremely predictable outcome that the U.S., Canada and Mexico compete in the majority of those. Arguably, that’s exactly the point since the Concacaf Nations League joined the region’s list of too-frequent competitions.

While the Concacaf Nations League was launched under the noble auspices of giving more competitive fixtures to regional minnows, the reality is an endless stream of semifinals and finals played mostly between those three North American foes, whose rivalry stokes regional tensions that can be enormously profitable at the box office.

The final foursome has already been contested four times since its launch in 2019, and will be contested again in 2027. The U.S. and Mexico have been a part of all four final fours, and Canada has made the last three. Those games pile onto the Gold Cup schedule which is already played every two years, rather than the quadrennial schedule of the European Championships, Asian Cup and in the future the Copa America.

The Same, But Not

Adding even more absurity to the burden was last year’s Concacaf participation in said Copa America for a second time in eight years.

Yes, the tournament obviously offers the federation’s top teams a more similar test to the approaching World Cup than will the Gold Cup. But if you’re going to play in it, maybe consider scaling back elsewhere? Something should have given, and yet it didn’t.

Combine all that together and you get numbers like Pulisic’s absurd appearance record since he first came on the USMNT scene in 2016.

Sanctioned Continental Competitions, Jan. 2016 to May 2025

NOTE: List include only competitions not tied to World Cup qualifying

• Concacaf: 10*
• UEFA: 6
• Conmebol: 4
• CAF: 4
• AFC: 2

*Includes collaboration with Conmebol on two Copa America tournaments

In 76 total U.S. appearances for Pulisic, 12 have come in a continental final, semifinal or third-place match. And he already skipped three of the four Gold Cups in that stretch.

If Pulisic had competed in every “major” continental competition the United States played in, he would’ve played in 10 different events sanctioned by Concacaf and Conmebol. (This total excludes World Cup and World Cup qualifying matches.) There’s no other continent that makes such similarly outrageous demands.

Over the same span, Cristiano Ronaldo has played in six such UEFA events for Portugal, which is the maximum possible since UEFA adopted its own, far more humane version of a Nations League. Lionel Messi has competed in four Copa Americas in the same timeframe, the only tournament Conmebol contests outside its admittedly draining World Cup qualifying format.

Rivalries Are Easier To Exploit

In any other region, the burden Concacaf places on teams would be seen as obvious overkill. That’s one reason Bayern Munich and Alphonso Davies’ agent both reacted so strongly when Alphonso Davies tore his ACL in Canada’s third-place victory over the United States in March. Sure, it was technically a competitive fixture. It was also the second “continental” third-place match the Bayern left back has played in nine months.

But because nearly every one of these competitions includes the prospect of a USA-Mexico and/or USA-Canada meeting, the generic pressure to participate is far higher than in your average UEFA Nations League match might be.

That’s just the dynamic of such a top-heavy federation. And in creating the Nations League and insisting on a biennial Gold Cup, Concacaf certainly knows those rivalry games are the likely outcome. The federations are also complicit. The U.S. and Mexico have met in seven competitive fixtures since the close of the 2018 World Cup, and could very well meet for an eighth time in that stretch. Apparently not content with that level of familiarity, they’ve also scheduled four friendlies over the span.

The most similar recent precedent for Concacaf’s overwhelming demands also had that rivalry dynamic: the long-defunct British Home Championship, a four-team tournament contested in a three-match round robin format between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It was abandoned in 1984 based on a combination of competitive and safety concerns, in an era when the majority of national team talent in most global regions still played its domestic football close to home.

The modern Concacaf era didn’t really begin until the launch of the Gold Cup several years later. So on some level it’s understandable the region is behind the times. But as the federation prepares to host its fourth World Cup, it’s long past time to get up to speed and start making at least some competitive decisions that have the player – not revenue potential – in mind. Because Pulisic, Davies and others currently face an impossible dynamic of always saying yes and risking their livelihoods, or occasionally saying no and risking their popularity.