"I appreciate the question, to be honest."
Christian Pulisic breaks into a smile. He could, truthfully, do without 99 percent of the questions he answers on a daily basis. He is a private person by nature, but he's spent the entirety of his adult life being American soccer's most famous figure. From the age of 16, Pulisic has lived a very public life in front of a country desperate for him to succeed. It's a big weight, one that Pulisic has now grown up with on his path towards and through superstardom. Shouldering that for anyone would be difficult; doing so as someone that tends to be more reserved is much, much harder.
Pulisic's life, of course, is flooded with questions. They've become harder to answer over the last few years. As things went downhill at Chelsea, for example, they also became somewhat repetitive.
"What can you do to fix this?" "What's going wrong?" "What must change to make sure this doesn't drag on even further?"
He answered those and thousands of others, both with his voice and with his play for AC Milan this year. But, on this day, Pulisic isn't here to answer those questions. He's hardly even talking about soccer. No, this is all about a question significantly more personal to him, one that he wishes he was asked more often.
"How are you?"
"When you start doing interviews all the time you get similar questions," Pulisic tells GOAL. "You can kind of go into that interview mode. I think I just kind of give the same old boring answers, but I think it's important to ask questions and it's important to get people, I don't know, talking about things that actually are interesting to them.
"My whole life is soccer all the time, and that's all people want to know about. It's normal, I get that's what you want to ask about. That's what's happening. That's what that's what we're known for. I guess I'm a pretty private person, so I wouldn't say that I want people to know more about me like, say Tyler [Adams] and Weston [McKennie] obviously do. I'm OK with people not knowing anything about me, but that doesn't mean that it's not good to ask sometimes about how other people are."
Ahead of the USMNT's quest for success at Copa America on home soil, GOAL sat down with Pulisic to discuss his life-changing season, the upcoming tournament, a potential legacy moment and, most importantly, how he's doing.