There’s a video from a United States U-15 camp three years ago that will make your head spin. It’s a routine training session for the boys on the pitch except one, a head shorter and a year or two younger than the others, who’s practicing with the national team for the first time.
Is the boy nervous? He is not. A pass floats into the box and he checks his run, tries to get under it, but the ball is too high for his 13-year-old head to reach. He doesn’t even jump. As the cross sails over him, he flings himself forward like Superman and flicks a heel up behind his back, catching the ball with a scorpion kick that bounces straight into the path of a teammate for a cartoon assist.
This is Cavan Sullivan: a player whose next move is difficult to predict, probably even for him. Which makes it even more remarkable that the predictions about him keep coming true.
By now, you may have heard about him. Whispered about by scouts since childhood, signed before he had played a single minute as a pro to join Manchester City the day he turns 18, Sullivan became the youngest debutant in Major League Soccer history when he was 14. But raw potential doesn’t mean much at that age: the child star whose record he broke was none other than Freddy Adu, the great cautionary tale of American soccer.
For two tantalizing years after he turned pro, Sullivan remained more a prophecy than a player, growing up on the Philadelphia Union’s bench. This summer, though, he got his shot, and in a recent run of starts he’s been rapidly, visibly maturing into the star who was promised. We finally have actual data on Sullivan and it’s very, very exciting.
Just getting on the pitch is already a promising sign. Of the 10 teenagers who have earned the most playing time in MLS since 2015, eight have made the leap – with varying degrees of success – to Europe’s top five leagues. Sullivan isn’t there yet but he has by far the most minutes of any 16-year-old in that time and runs a close second to Adri Mehmeti, the 17-year-old currently bossing the New York Red Bulls’ midfield, at the next age up.
Another leading indicator is how much his teammates trust him.
“No matter what age you are, when a practice starts and guys give you the ball, that’s the ultimate sign of respect,” Sullivan’s first coach at the Union, Jim Curtin, said. “Within 10 seconds into the first training session, they gave him the ball.”
That’s true in games, too. Sullivan takes 10.3% of his team’s touches, the most of any teenage MLS winger in at least a decade. Second place is Alphonso Davies, now of Bayern Munich, the best homegrown player the league has ever produced.
Then of course there are the highlight numbers – four goals and three assists in MLS this season. Seven and seven in all competitions. Three and three in his last five games alone. Those are noisy stats, but the underlying numbers so far look just as bright: his 0.48 expected goals and assists per 90 minutes rank fourth among MLS teens with at least 1,000 minutes played, one spot below Jhon Duran, who broke the league transfer fee record when he moved to Aston Villa at 19.
Advanced stats go deeper into Sullivan’s game. Player ratings in futi, a soccer stats app I co-created, use a model called possession value to estimate how much every touch of the ball changes teams’ goal probabilities, so that a line-breaking pass in midfield, a goalline clearance or a dribble on the wing can all be added up in terms of their expected impact on the scoreline. The app adjusts these values based on how a player’s team plays with and without him, then scales the rating within his data-derived tactical role.
According to futi ratings, Sullivan’s 2026 is the second-best of any MLS teenager on record, trailing only Gianluca Busio, now the captain of Venezia in Serie A, when he was three years older. The best 16-year-old MLS has ever seen isn’t just getting minutes and goals – he’s helping his team all over the pitch.
When trying to describe a precocious, small, left-footed right-winger who loves to perform tricks, it’s too easy to reach for the most unfair comparison of all time, yet it’s a documented fact that Sullivan modeled his game after Lionel Messi (obligatory note: we’re not saying Sullivan has the same level of ability as the Argentinian). When Sullivan scored his first professional goal by slicing inside and curling a diagonal to an overlapping left-back before finishing a cutback from the penalty spot, it was impossible not to see Messi’s signature combination with Jordi Alba.
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Sullivan doesn’t play as centrally as Messi, though. Futi’s player style model classifies him as a “wide playmaker”; an attacker who likes to collect the ball out near the touchline and then break lines and create for teammates. He’s a ball-to-feet type who averages just 6.2 progressive receptions per 90 minutes and ranks in the 19th percentile among wide attackers for the directness of the passes he receives, meaning he’s not doing a lot of running in behind.
What he’s doing instead, mostly, is dribbling. Sullivan’s style on the ball is less a young Messi and more like his other childhood hero, Alexis Sánchez: hips low, elbows out, juking defenders with feints, stutters, stepovers and changes of direction. He mixes in his weak foot to keep tacklers on their toes and applies a variety of touches to the ball, including a kid’s fair share of overly ambitious ones.
The thing that makes his chaotic game hang together is an awareness of what’s going on around him. “I would say the big word is ‘playmaker,’” Sullivan told ESPN when he was 14. “That’s what I try and be every game, every training. I think I’m good on the dribble. My decision making is pretty good, and my vision on the field is one of my qualities.”
Even when he’s squirming past defenders, Sullivan is preternaturally aware of his teammates’ runs and constantly looking to play them into dangerous spots. He averages 5.0 progressive passes per 90 minutes, top five among all MLS wide attackers. One of his trademark moves is dribbling across the defense and then snapping off a perfectly timed ball at an unexpected angle for a runner in the channel; another is trying some crazy lob over the back line, which occasionally comes off.
The downside of this risky style of play is that he makes a lot of turnovers. The Union don’t really mind, though. Sullivan’s 65% pass completion rate is among the lowest in the league but about par for Philadelphia, the most direct team in MLS. It’s anyone’s guess how he might adapt to a totally different game at Man City.
To even get there, he’ll have to answer some hard questions about his size and speed. Only 15 players in the Premier League last season were listed at or below Sullivan’s current 5ft 7in, and just one of them, Enzo Le Fée, was a starter in a similar role. Unlike Christian Pulisic, America’s last phenom to break through on the wing, Sullivan isn’t especially fast, which will be a tough sell in an increasingly physical European game.
Then again, he’s been beating bigger, faster guys his whole life. Go back and watch those old videos of this squib of a kid getting hip-checked by players twice his size, sprawling to the ground and somehow popping up with the ball velcroed to his feet. He is scrappy, relentless. As Bruce Arena once said of Clint Dempsey, Cavan Sullivan tries shit.
Go ahead, just try to predict what he’ll do next.
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