Julian Green, Swallowed by the Hype Whale

For fans of the U.S. Men's National Team, last summer's World Cup campaign caromed crazily from one holy shit moment to another. Clint Dempsey's first-minute strike against Ghana and Silvestre Varela's last-gasp equalizer for Portugal. Tim Howard, again and again and again. But perhaps no moment had quite the impact of Julian Green's extra-time volley past the fingertips of Belgium keeper Thibaut Courtois.

In a game that might as well have been designed in a lab to break American hearts—90 minutes of clenched fists and frayed nerves followed by successive gut punches from Wondolowski, De Bruyne, and Lukaku—Green briefly turned everything on its head. For years, we'd heard about USMNT coach Jürgen Klinsmann's attempts to bring the Tampa-born Bayern Munich youngster into the fold. For weeks, we'd debated his surprise inclusion on the World Cup squad, and the possible ulterior motives that lay behind it. And now here he was, just a few minutes after all had seemed lost, scoring an absurdly attractive goal with his first-ever touch in international competition, and in so doing bringing the U.S. again within a goal of taking the heavily-favored Belgians to penalty kicks.

It wasn't important, really, that a second goal never came. The same holds for the fact that Green's strike, on repeat viewings, looked as much the product of a Belgian lapse, a Michael Bradley masterstroke, and pure dumb luck as it did any skill on Green's part. All that only served to deepen its impact. American fans have seen quite enough workmanlike college type midfielders, thanks. What we want more than anything now—and what has been in frustratingly short supply even as the national team has steadily improved—is the kind of player who thrives within the sport's ambiguities, who creates those singular moments of magic, who produces the irreproducible. In that moment, and in our memory of it, Julian Green created that.

That we're so eager to invest so much in any young USMNT attacker who displays an ounce of flair may not make it any easier to accept that Green is where he is now, less than eight months later: unable to find minutes on one of the worst squads in the Bundesliga, reportedly facing a fine or an early ticket home for his refusal to play for its reserve team. But it definitely makes all that easier to understand.

For a while last summer, even Bayern Munich seemed to have bought the hype, promoting Green to the first team and reportedly turning down loan offers with an eye towards including him in its plans for the upcoming season. Perhaps this was just a canny piece of marketing as the club embarked on a preseason tour of the states; in any case, Green was eventually loaned to Hamburger SV, a Bundesliga club in dire need of attacking options. Still, for American fans watching other USMNT players continue their mass exodus from Europe, a 19-year-old Julian Green knocking in goals for a senior side in one of the best leagues in the world was a tantalizing prospect.

That illusion lasted exactly 45 minutes. It's hard to overstate the disastrousness of Green's HSV debut last September. Starting on the right wing in a tough away fixture at Hannover 96, he looked out of his depth almost immediately, getting easily knocked off the ball nearly every time he received it and running quickly into trouble when he managed not to. Twenty minutes in, HSV manager Mirko Slomka switched him to the left; at halftime, he subbed him off. The next day, Slomka was fired. Green hasn't made a start since.

Things went from bad to worse in a hurry last week, when it emerged, over the course of several days and conflicting reports, that HSV had told Green to suit up for its U-23 side, which plays in the fourth-division Regionalliga Nord, and that he had refused. Bayern chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge called the situation "regrettable," and rumors swirled that Green's loan might be terminated early. After reportedly meeting with HSV brass on Wednesday, he finally played for the reserves, scoring a goal in a friendly against fifth-division Halstenbrek-Rellingen.

Germans and Americans share a fervor for moralistic judgments of star athletes' work ethic, and the way Green has handled his demotion has made him a target of both. In the German media, it's been an opportunity to sneer at a jumped-up "US-Boy" who tasted World Cup glory only by casting his lot with an inferior soccer power. American fans, meanwhile, can take a kind of masochistic pleasure in tearing down what we ourselves have built up in our minds. "Is Julian Green the next Freddy Adu?" we ask, without the slightest goddamn trace of irony or self-awareness. We'll ask the same question about the next Julian Green, too.

Is it even worth evaluating the merits of the case, here? It's entirely possible that scoring a dramatic goal at the biggest sporting event on Earth may have gone to a 19-year-old's head a little bit. Of course it is. It's also probably true that if a highly-touted 19-year-old is going to play reserve-team soccer, he's better off doing it for his parent club, not the bottom-feeder where he was sent to gain first-team experience. But the details hardly seem to matter.

Anyone old enough to rent a car has had the peculiar experience of watching sports and realizing, to your surprise and maybe a bit of discomfort, that you're several years older than the square-jawed superhuman whose latest outrageous feat of athleticism is flashing across the screen. With Green, the effect is quite the opposite; lean, boyish, smiling, he barely looks old enough for a high school varsity team, much less the most storied and successful club in the Bundesliga. In a U.S. Soccer video recorded just before the World Cup, he talked about learning to drive and his plans to move out of his mom's house.

And maybe this is why the dehumanizing cruelty of the athlete hype cycle—our loud and so-predictable ceremony of willful ignorance—is unusually obvious in this case. We'd rather perform these sad rituals without having to think about a teenager sitting in his first apartment and getting on Twitter or Facebook to endure a transatlantic tongue-lashing about his bad attitude and lack of professionalism, all for the crime of playing soccer and being a kid and listening to what people—many of the same people, surely—spent the better part of 2014 saying about him.

It's impossible to know what will become of Julian Green when this big, ugly machine of ours finally spits him out the other side. But it says an awful lot that the best he can hope for is to be swallowed up by it again.