By Charles Boehm – WASHINGTON, DC (Sep 29, 2016) US Soccer Players - It's as delightful as it is surprising to watch Christian Pulisic keep meeting and fulfilling one new challenge after another on his Borussia Dortmund adventure. His latest exploit: Notching an assist as an impact substitute in BVB's pulsating 2-2 Champions League draw with mighty Real Madrid.

Also not surprising: The brighter Pulisic shines, the more some question his Americanness, whether subtly or overtly.

As the 18-year-old keeps performing well, observers address their cognitive dissonance in different ways. “He learned the important stuff in Germany,” they say. Or, “He's really Croatian at heart, you know.” Then there's the simpler method of disbelief. “He's a complete freak, an accident, a one-off.”

Few at home or abroad are well-prepared to make sense of a teenage North American consistently proving his quality in the sport's very uppermost levels. And it shows. This level of play is actually not completely unprecedented. Think of DaMarcus Beasley or Claudio Reyna at Rangers, or Sacha Kljestan or Jonathan de Guzman just a few years ago. But Pulisic and the other most prominent Yanks and Canadians abroad are doing it in front of far bigger global audiences. There's also the larger, more connected fan base back home.

Unfortunately, the practice of discounting our best players' merits and talent – even their very status as Americans or Canadians – is a well-established tradition. It's hung on stubbornly despite enormous overall progress in all areas of the sport.

Let's call it soccer colonialism. It's the unhappy legacy of being one of the game's “last frontiers” on earth. It's a place that needs outside help to develop expertise and build a culture. Where a history of struggle and a preponderance of other sports allows for second-guessing of everything that we've done. Like political imperialism, it's a cunning phenomenon which seeps into our every pore and colors our outlook, both as individuals and as a community.

A few of the precepts for colonialism:

What's imported is inherently superior to what's grown locally

The colonized are behind the curve and need colonizers' help to have any hope of “catching up”

Colonies are sources of raw material, shipped back to the “motherland” to be “refined”

It's not hard to see this mentality at work in multiple areas of our game. What's the message when soccer fans wake up at the crack of dawn on weekend mornings and file en masse into pubs to watch Europe's top leagues, yet won't bother to drive a few miles to watch an MLS game in person? The domestic product has flaws, of course. That's whether by the perception of it as contrived, lacking history or promotion/relegation, or the simple calculation that it's of inferior quality.

Many of the same fans dutifully pay World Cup-level ticket prices every summer for exhibition visits by their favorite European clubs. Despite the fact that they're watching glorified preseason scrimmages.

Even among those who do give MLS, or NASL, or USL a shot, nothing spikes interest like the acquisition of big (or even medium-sized) names from overseas. “Designated Players” have helped push North America's top-flight pro league to a new level of prosperity. It's not just because it brought the sustained injection of elite ability.

When a parent seeks out the best coaching and optimal developmental environment for their talented youth soccer player here, what criteria weigh heaviest? The answers to this vary. However, it's a time-honored tradition that the coach's accent exerts a powerful subconscious tug at mom and dad's heart and purse strings. It's that authenticity thing again.

Aha, you're saying. But European soccer IS better than what we have in North America. Yes, that's true. In much the same sense Europeans enjoy a statistically higher standard of living than their former colonies. Why? By some built-in right to superiority? Of course not. It's the lingering product of centuries of colonialism.

OF COURSE the Champions League is qualitatively better than anything we've got here. So is England's top division, and Spain's, and Germany's, and Italy's, and France's, and probably a few more leagues on “the continent.” Note that there's no need for me to specify which continent I'm talking about. The same is true in relation to Europe vs Asia, or Australia, and all but a few pockets of South America.

That last part should give us pause. Latin America is generally seen as home to the most fanatical, dyed-in-the-wool soccer cultures on the planet. It also has the densest, most heavily-shopped pools of player talent. Yet, Europe's leagues are still viewed as superior in most cases. So it's not just about skill, then, but infrastructure, and spending... and deeply-held perceptions of “the places to be.”

After all these years, soccer colonialism is so pervasive that it colors even our reactions against it. Many have tried to fight this mentality by standing up for homegrown players, teams, and leagues, often to absurdly illogical rhetorical extremes. Yet pretending that there's even a level playing field for our own to fight on does them few favors.

“The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else,” wrote Kurt Vonnegut in the novel Bluebeard. “This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?”

Pulisic is as American as they come, even if it took a Croatian passport to help him gain entry to one of the world's biggest clubs. The foundations of his game were lovingly crafted on these shores, by his coaches but just as significantly by his family. He has undoubtedly benefited from a world-class finishing school at Dortmund, just as other Yanks with similarly exquisite tools would in similar circumstances.

No, he's not a freak or a one-off. We can produce more like him, even if our player development system remains riddled with inefficiencies. Our collective belief that it's possible is a huge piece of the puzzle in making it happen.

Charles Boehm is a Washington, DC-based writer and the editor of The Soccer Wire. Contact him at:cboehm@thesoccerwire.com. Follow him on Twitter at:http://twitter.com/cboehm.

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