Donovan takes aim at Pulisic

The most interesting part is not whether Pulisic is good enough, because he clearly is a useful player, but whether the setup around him has made him harder to assess honestly. When a player becomes a marketing project as much as a footballer, every criticism sounds personal and every defence sounds staged.
 
I can see why Donovan is annoyed because from the outside it looks like everyone has been trying to manage the brand more than the football, and that is never a healthy place for a player to be. But at the same time, once the whole country decides someone is the face of the team, the backlash becomes ridiculous too and you end up with people talking about him like he is the problem with everything. It is all so overcooked and now every interview, every sponsor bit, every little quote gets turned into some huge story and honestly it just makes the lad look even more boxed in than before and maybe the people around him have made it worse by trying to control every bit of the narrative and now nobody knows what is real and what is just PR anymore
 
was in the pub last night and some bloke was saying exactly this about him like hes the american answer to all their problems and another lad was saying he wouldnt start for half the top sides in europe and they nearly came to blows over it which is ridiculous because nobody in that pub had watched a full game of theirs all season and yet everyone had an opinion on the sponsors and the teammates and the coaches and all that, football chat has become pure theatre sometimes
 
the funny thing is people keep acting like this is some shocking revelation when every big national team has its own little celebrity bubble around the main star and the media feeds it until it becomes impossible to separate football from branding and then everyone gets angry when the player does not live up to the fantasy, it happens over and over again and now Donovan is basically saying what loads of fans have been thinking for ages, that the whole thing feels forced and guarded and a bit fake and the more they try to protect him the more distant he seems and the whole debate just keeps spiralling because nobody wants to admit the marketing was doing too much from the start
 
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