Why do so many American soccer stars move to Germany? - Insider

And when a 17-year-old Christian Pulisic scored his first Bundesliga goal for Borussia Dortmund against Hamburg SV in April 2016, the then 17-year-old changed the benchmark for young Americans aspiring to make it in pro soccer.

No longer did the United States' finest young stars want to follow in the footsteps of Clint Dempsey and Tim Howard and play in the English Premier League, nor did they want to try and emulate the achievements of Landon Donovan in the MLS — they wanted to go to Germany.

Currently, no top flight league in the whole of Europe boasts more Americans, nor USMNT internationals, than the Bundesliga, and several more stars have secured big money moves away from Germany to other elite European leagues in recent years.

There's Tyler Adams at RB Leipzig, Weston McKennie who moved from Schalke to Juventus this summer, Werder Bremen's Josh Sargent, Bayern Munich's Chris Richards, Wolfsburg's John Brooks, and of course, Pulisic, the most expensive American soccer player ever.

Having spent the majority of his youth career playing for the PA Classics, a US Soccer Development Academy club, in his home town of Hershey, Pennsylvania, Pulisic turned down Barcelona to join Dortmund in 2015.

After moving to the Ruhr, Pulisic quickly established himself as one of the club's hottest young stars, scoring 10 and assisting eight goals in just 15 games with the Dortmund youth teams – form which earned him a first team call up less than a year after moving from America. .

Since Pulisic moved to Dortmund as a teenager and took the Bundesliga by storm, a total of eight fellow Americans have made the switch to the German top flight, all seemingly attempting to emulate Pulisic in one way or another. .

"The main reason that a lot of young players want to come here, is [that] you see player after player given their opportunity to go out there, whether they make a mistake the first game or not, they're trusted that they are only going to get better with more minutes," Adams, who moved from the New York Red Bulls to Leipzig in 2019, said.

The Leipzig star added: "Having the youngest team in the Bundesliga year after year just goes to prove that [the club] is only going to continue to play young players.

Adams, though older than Pulisic when he moved to Germany, says he received similar treatment from Leipzig in order to help him settle

"We're happy to have these young Americans in the Bundesliga because they're excellent players and they have everything we like to see in Germany," he told Bleacher Report

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