Jordan Morris, Christian Pulisic share a trait not seen before in American soccer prodigies

Expectations, of course, far outpace reasonable projections. In the business of hyping young athletes, there is no room for perspective or nuance.

But the truth of the matter is that for Jordan Morris – the most highly anticipated soccer player to come out of the American college ranks in, well, ever – a productive rookie season with the Seattle Sounders was a big ask. For his seven appearances with the senior United States national team, including one in a World Cup qualifier, the former Stanford striker was new to the rigors of a particularly draining league like Major League Soccer, what with its travel and climate changes and fields of varying turf and grass.

Then there was the plain fact that competition up front for head coach Sigi Schmid’s side was murderous. Clint Dempsey and Obafemi Martins already formed the best striker tandem in the league. And the Sounders had Nelson Valdez – he of the 54 goals for Werder Bremen, Borussia Dortmund and Valencia, plus 13 for Paraguay – backing them up. Then, when Martins was sold to China just before the season, Seattle signed veteran national team striker Herculez Gomez.

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If you insisted on putting a number on it (and predicting scoring tallies is a fool’s errand for strikers), a handful of goals over the course of his first season would have represented a very healthy return for the 21-year-old Morris.

After 30 games, he has 12 goals, a new MLS record for American rookies. His six game-winners is also the most ever by an MLS first-year player. With four regular-season games remaining, Morris stands five goals away from equaling Cyle Larin’s MLS single-season rookie record of 17, set last year for Orlando City SC.

Morris leads the Sounders in scoring, and only Dempsey and his $4.6 million salary (which dwarfs Morris’s $190,500) comes close with eight goals. The next-best scorer has four.

Over in the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia, there’s a club called Borussia Dortmund with an American teenager called Christian Pulisic whom you’ve no doubt heard. He just turned 18, celebrating his birthday at a Justin Bieber concert to rub our noses into how young he really is, and he has already played in 17 Bundesliga and Champions League games, and represented the United States eight times, scoring thrice.

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When he left Hershey, Pa., in January 2015, he was an unknown quantity to all but the most obsessive U.S. national team fans, even though he’d had a torrid career with the under-15 and under-17 national teams – 50 goals in 62 combined appearances. So there was no expectation, or even awareness, at the outset. But that changed soon enough when the attacking midfielder played a dozen times and scored two goals for Dortmund’s senior team in the second half of last season.

And so we, the American soccer community in all our angst and insecurity, began warning ourselves. Go easy. Don’t say too much. It’s too soon. The pressure will crush him. We bandied about the names of the fallen. Adu. Altidore. Agudelo. Green. Those who didn’t quite deliver and those who never worked out. All of the phenoms who proved not to be the savior after all.

Of course, we built Pulisic up anyway. Soon enough, he was the biggest thing in American soccer since Freddy Adu. But the unperturbed Pulisic kept on playing well and even scoring, even though he conceded publicly that he felt the pressure. It made for a confusing narrative, turning on its head the assumptions we’ve made.

Morris, likewise, hasn’t apparently been affected much by the hubbub made over a collegian playing serious minutes for the senior national team and at times looking like its most threatening forward.

Which leaves you to wonder if we, the soccer echo chamber, really have any effect at all. For all our hand-wringing over the various ways we think we can ruin a player, maybe the fans and the press and the former players and the other assorted voices of the game, inflate our own influence to fantastical levels.
Maybe we aren’t really at fault for Freddy Adu’s torturous and tortuous decline from “The Next Pele” to “that guy who was supposed to be the next Pele, whatever happened to him?” He never really filled out, had some attitude issues, went to Europe too soon, never really stuck it out anywhere.

And perhaps we really aren’t to blame for Jozy Altidore proving to be a very good striker, albeit not exactly that first American global superstar we had hoped he would become. He was always limited in certain ways, and he had bad luck with the clubs he chose before finding a good home with Toronto FC.

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Juan Agudelo was dumped into the starting job of the senior national team at 17 &nash; how could we not get pumped by that? – but he bounced around MLS some and then also went to Europe before he’d properly established himself here. And Julian Green, who arguably never had any business being at the 2014 World Cup, hasn’t made a mark on the senior club game anywhere.

They all fell short of expectations, even if some of them are having &nash; or might still have &nash; good careers. But maybe their failures had nothing to do at all with pressure. It probably didn’t help, but the yoke of playing for the best clubs, in a Darwinian environment, surely weighs heavier.

Pulisic and Morris seem to demonstrate that, as a factor in the way a player’s career comes to unfurl, external pressure might be rather overstated. It very well could be that pressure emanating from the United States remains a lightweight when it comes to the heft and scrutiny it manages to place on players.

Or maybe Pulisic and Morris are the exceptions to the rule, underscoring what makes them both exceptional.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.