If 16-year-old Cavan Sullivan takes the field for the US men’s national team in the coming days, he will join a list of youngest-ever US players that has no shortage of recognizable names. At the top is onetime phenom (turned cautionary tale) Freddy Adu, still the youngest player to ever appear for the US men. Names in the top 20 like Eddie Gaven and Bobby Convey will feel familiar to longtime US fans; Christian Pulisic, Yunus Musah and Gio Reyna are all still very much in the picture and may well prove to be Sullivan’s future partners in attack.
Just below Adu’s name and above those five mentioned is a trio of names unknown to the vast majority of US fans: Mike Slivinski, Mark Jonas and Nelson Vargas. All three players made their debut in a 1991 friendly against Jamaica, with Slivinski and Jonas both younger than Sullivan will be should he appear for the US this window. Only Vargas featured for the US again, capped an additional three times between 1991 and 1994.
The idea of a 16-year-old representing the US at the senior level has been mainstreamed by now, but it was unheard of in the early 1990s, long before the US Soccer Federation pumped millions into youth development and talent identification. So much so that when Sullivan received his call-up last week, nobody seemed to even remember the three players who, more than three decades ago, carved their names into the record books. I don’t think it was a dream, I’m pretty sure I didn’t imagine the one game I played.” When Bora Milutinovic took the reins as US head coach in 1991, he inherited a program approaching the most pivotal moment in its history.
A year earlier, the US had appeared in their first World Cup in four decades. In three years, the country would host the tournament for the first time. It was imperative, then, that the USMNT put in a decent showing on home soil.
Milutinovic took a long, wandering path to the USMNT, with stops as a player or coach in a dozen or so different countries. He led Mexico at the 1986 World Cup and Costa Rica in 1990, guiding both sides to their then-best-ever finishes. His reputation as a bit of a miracle worker – a specialist extracting results out of underperforming teams – was a perfect fit for a US side who lacked little in the way of grit but still missed the quality to compete with the world’s best.
In short order, Milutinovic set out on a talent identification journey that was unprecedented at the time, calling hundreds of players into varying camps and handing nearly 50 of them their first caps in his three years at the helm. In August 1991, that scouting journey took Milutinovic to the U-17 World Cup in Italy. There, an unheralded group of US youngsters bossed an Italy squad featuring Alessandro Del Piero and an Argentina team led by Marcelo Gallardo and Juan Sebastián Verón.
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