In the moments before Saturday’s Champions League final, players from more than a dozen countries on four continents will suit up to represent Chelsea and Manchester City. They’ll receive their final instructions from their managers, a pair of tactical masterminds from Catalonia and Bavaria. And once they jog onto the field, they’ll slide seamlessly between four or five languages.
For the most significant annual match in the world’s most popular sport, a pair of lineups that could pass for a United Nations roll call surprises exactly no one. And yet, one certainty on Saturday night still seems remarkable: an American soccer player is going home with a Champions League winners’ medal.
That player will either be Chelsea’s Christian Pulisic, the 22-year-old playmaker from Pennsylvania, or Manchester City’s Zack Steffen, the 26-year backup goalkeeper who grew up roughly an hour away.
“Right now it’s just surreal,” Steffen says. “And it’s just crazy that two kids from Pennsylvania are facing up in a Champions League final.”
Their unlikely meeting speaks to a larger truth about modern soccer. Pulisic and Steffen are both products of a global system so sophisticated that clubs no longer miss young talent just because a player happened to be born along Pennsylvania’s Route 283 instead of Rome, Rio, or Manchester.
