Christian Pulisic is ready for this World Cup challenge and the USMNT needs him to be

INGLEWOOD, Calif.— Since the tender age of 17, Christian Pulisic has shouldered the burden of being the Future of American Soccer.The future needs to become the present.

Tomorrow needs to arrive today.With the U.S.Men’s National Team playing a World Cup on home soil for the first time in 32 years — having kicked off Group D on Friday in SoFi Stadium against Paraguay — Pulisic is the most important player on a team having its most important moment in a generation.

Maybe ever.“I can’t even imagine the weight that’s on his shoulders, in terms of from such a young age he was the hope of American soccer,” said Tyler Adams, who has been Pulisic’s U.S.teammate since the U-17 level.

“To step into a World Cup cycle going into 2018 and be the best player on the field at 17 years old, and be the person that they rely on — it’s been since then that the team has relied on him.“Now, we have weapons around him to kind of relieve that.But he’s a star; not just for the U.S.

national team, but in world football.”Pulisic is facing pressure usually reserved for stars of world football.No U.S.player — Alexi Lalas on that 1994 team, Landon Donovan on later squads — has been under this kind of microscope.

Very few have, perhaps France’s Zinedine Zidane in 1998, Germany’s Michael Ballack in 2006 and Brazil’s Neymar in 2014.Those hosts were all far better teams than the U.S.But the bar has been raised for the U.S.

— with a quarterfinal berth widely viewed as a viable goal — and Pulisic has welcomed those higher expectations.“[This pressure is] what I’ve always wanted,” the 27-year-old Pulisic said.“We are a really good team.We want to be a force.”The U.S.

will need the introverted Pulisic to be forceful, and a leader.He has increasingly matured into those roles.They’ve been hit-or-miss at the World Cup since reaching the 2002 quarterfinals.

They got knocked out in the Round of 16 in 2010, ’14 and ’22, bounced in the group s...