Today, the phrase “Christian Pulisic to Barcelona” would make for the ideal English tabloid headline. It’s plausible enough to allow you to briefly recast Barça’s Holy Trinity of Lionel Messi, Luis Suárez, and Neymar with the young American attacker (say it with me: “M-S-P”), while remaining outlandish enough to ensure that you’d never utter the thought aloud to anyone except your browser’s history.

But a few years ago, Pulisic did go to Barcelona. Only 14 years old at the time, and still several years away from exploding onto the American and European soccer scenes, he was invited to train at the fabled Catalonian club.

A move to Barcelona — with the Camp Nou, tiki-taka, tapas, and Messi — would be a dream for any teenager who’s laced up a pair of cleats and picked up a FIFA controller, but Rob Moore wasn’t sure that this was where Pulisic needed to be. Moore, a 54-year-old South African native and the founder of the U.K.-based soccer agency On Target, had been scouting the youngster for a few years. Although Pulisic’s speed, technical ability, and aggression impressed him, Moore thought that he would struggle to make the jump from Barça’s youth squads to its perennial Champions League–contending senior team. It wasn’t the right fit.

Over coffee with Pulisic’s father, Mark, at a café in Barcelona, Moore — who was living there at the time — wanted to know one thing: Who paid for the trip to Spain? When Mark replied that he had footed the bill, Moore felt that his hunch was correct. “I said, ‘Mark, red flag number one. If they really believed he had a huge upside, they would be flying you over and putting you up in proper hotels,’” Moore said. “‘There’s a different road that I believe he has to start down.’”

To Moore, Pulisic’s road to first-team professional European soccer ran first through Holland or Germany, two leagues renowned for integrating young players into their senior squads. The family agreed, ending their flirtation with Barcelona and focusing their attention on clubs elsewhere on the continent. From there, Moore arranged for a series of trials at PSV Eindhoven, toyed with some serious interest from Arsenal, and secured an offer to have Pulisic join Borussia Dortmund, a German club with a strong track record of youth development and, more importantly, one that was so eager to sign the talented youngster that they helped him secure a European Union passport (via Croatia, where Pulisic’s grandfather was born) so he could join the club at 16 instead of 18.

“Together with Rob and my family, we could see that Dortmund was the best place for my development, and we haven’t looked back since,” the now-19-year-old American star said in an email.

From there, the story of Pulisic’s ascent is well known — rising to Dortmund’s senior team, shredding defenders, scoring in the Champions League, carrying the U.S. men’s national team through its failed bid at World Cup qualification, potentially moving to the Premier League this summer — but the behind-the-scenes role that Moore played as an adviser to the family is not.

So far, Moore and his team have placed 11 young Americans at European clubs, including Schalke’s Nick Taitague and Haji Wright (who’s currently on loan at German second-division club Sandhausen). And there are reports that another of Moore’s clients, U.S. under-18 international Taylor Booth, will soon be bound for Bayern Munich.

“I’m trying to set the bar higher,” Moore says. “I’m trying to play a small role in helping America have more world-class players at the absolute top, which by definition will be few and far between. But the biggest challenge is the step just below that. In other words, more Americans playing at good clubs in good leagues in Europe. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

If Moore is right, American soccer fans soon will be able to see on the pitch what they have been dreaming about for years: a U.S. men’s national team filled with players as good as Pulisic.

In April 2010 — as smoke from an Icelandic volcano paralyzed air travel across Europe — Greg Petersen was stuck in Barcelona. A longtime American soccer coach with a flowing ’80s-style mullet and the speaking style of a California surfer, Petersen was in the city for a series of meetings with Moore. The two had met briefly a few years prior in Cape Town, and Moore was now feeling out Petersen for a job. “I was supposed to be there for three days,” recalled Petersen. “I ended up staying with Rob for an extra week.”

Moore had a big idea to discuss with Petersen: building the first global soccer academy. Dubbed Project SoHo, it would have outposts in countries around the world, from Nigeria, Ghana, and Japan to the United States, Argentina, and Brazil, and it would develop young players for the top clubs in Europe.

Moore had identified San Diego as the ideal location for the academy’s U.S. outpost. In the soccer hotbed of Southern California, he could schedule competitive matches for his team with the benefit of year-round sunshine. But when he was unable to secure financing for the ambitious venture, he decided to focus instead on a smaller project: working with the nation’s best players.

“The culture is not there in the U.S to produce 20 to 25 players every year that are of good European quality. It’s unrealistic to think that,” says Moore. “But there are maybe three or four that can play at a decent level each year, and I saw that potential. And I looked at this and said, ‘If you’re not going to do an academy, then focus on the talent.’”

It was the latest career pivot for Moore in a lifetime of them. Born in Cape Town in 1963, he grew up playing soccer in a rugby-obsessed country. When he finished high school, he went to England to try to latch on with a professional club as a goalkeeper. After eight rejections, Reading FC were prepared to offer him a contract, but he was unable to get out of South Africa’s compulsory military service and was forced to return home.

With dreams of a professional playing career extinguished, Moore went into the magazine publishing business, importing top American titles like Men’s Health and Golf Digest into the South African market for the first time. “The media industry taught me a lot,” he said. “I felt that when I looked at my American counterparts, we could learn from the quality of their journalism.”

He took the same approach — learn from the best — when he went into soccer club ownership. With the money he made from selling his magazine publishing company, Moore founded a soccer club, Seven Stars, in 1995 in Cape Town, and four years later merged it with another club to form Ajax Cape Town, the first global affiliate of the Dutch giants Ajax Amsterdam. There, he began his longtime interest in player development.

Despite all of his duties as a club owner, Moore preferred to spend his Saturdays outside the owners’ box, watching matches from the under-9s to the under-19s in a camp chair. “I can envision Rob right now. I know exactly where he was sitting at the complex where he could overlook all the fields,” says Petersen, who first met Moore on a visit to work with the Ajax Cape Town coaching staff.

After just two years, Moore sold his stake in the club in 2001 and relocated to Barcelona, a move he says was driven primarily by political changes in South Africa and a desire to raise his young sons in Europe. In Barcelona, Moore launched his agency, initially working with African players like Benni McCarthy, Steven Pienaar, and Victor Wanyama (he still represents Pienaar and Wanyama and remains close with McCarthy, who now coaches in South Africa) before making his more recent push into the U.S. market.

In becoming an agent, Moore entered a business with an unsavory reputation. Every transfer window, billions of dollars move from club to club, with agents pocketing portions of each million-dollar fee. At its worst, unscrupulous agents cycle players on a club-to-club carousel, looking out for their own interests at the expense of their clients’ careers. According to the UEFA’s most recent Club Licensing Benchmarking Report, agents received €1.27 billion from clubs across the 2,000 transfers that were studied for the report between 2013 and 2017, an amount that represents only 40 percent of the transfers that took place during that period involving European clubs. (If you do the math, that’s an estimated €3.175 billion paid to agents over those years.) In that same period, on any given transfer, agents received about 12.6 percent of the total fee.

Moore admits that he — like everyone else in the sport — is motivated by self-interest, but he sees his company’s work as a more holistic enterprise than that of a traditional agent negotiating transfer fees and contracts. Operating at the nexus between players and clubs, Moore’s company advises players on finding the right clubs and clubs on finding the right players. His colleague Petersen described their work as closer to that of “football consultants,” one part career counselor, one part technical adviser, one part media consultant, one part negotiator, and one part life coach.

Moore’s work in this field over the years has put him in touch with clubs and coaches across Europe, which he believes gives him a critical advantage over domestic agents when advising American players. “You have to be based full time in Europe, going to clubs and talking football with them so they have a healthy respect for your opinion,” he says. “You can’t do that sitting in an office in Los Angeles. You’re too detached, and you’re not enough in the action.”

Moore says that he offers a unique value to the American soccer community: He knows European soccer better than domestic-based agents and has the experience and connections to place the top young players at the right clubs that will help turn them into the next Pulisics.

“If he says he knows José Mourinho and Arsène Wenger, that’s not just dropping names to impress you. That’s legit,” says Moore’s U.S.-based scout and colleague Greg Petersen.

Unlike some other global talent agencies, Moore runs a small team, focusing on a limited number of clients (35 in total, with one-third coming from the United States). Moore sits atop the organization, overseeing all major decisions and working directly with clubs in Europe and families in the United States. In the U.S., Petersen is the scout on the ground. (On the morning we spoke over the phone, he was attending an under-12 youth tournament in Florida looking at players from international and domestic clubs.) Moore’s son Matthew handles media and marketing inquiries for the firm’s clients, and three other full-time staff members are scattered around Europe to provide additional scouting and client support.

“He has these little henchmen who follow your player whenever you’re on trial,” says John Taitague, the father of U.S. youth international Nick Taitague, one of Moore’s clients who recently joined Schalke. This individualized attention was an important reason that Taitague and his son decided to sign with Moore after having a bad initial experience with another agency that had brought him and his son to Manchester United but failed to inform the club that they were coming. “When you work with a bad agent and then you work with a good agent,” he says, “you know the difference.”

However, it’s not the location or table manners that distinguish Moore from other U.S.-based agents. While other agents will work with MLS clubs or send their prospects to college first, Moore wants to work with only European-bound players, believing that the competition in Europe is necessary to allow elite American players to reach their full potential.

“If you look at what MLS has done, they’ve done a great job for a certain level of player,” he says. “And that level of player is 99.9 percent of the football-playing population.”

But for those with the potential of a Pulisic — the 0.1 percent that Moore wants to work with in the United States — Europe is the only option.

“If Christian Pulisic only had a U.S. passport, I’m firmly of the belief — and you’ll laugh at me — that based on history, he would be playing regular minutes in the USL and getting the occasional minutes in the MLS at 18. I firmly believe that,” Moore says. He believes it was Pulisic’s access to a Croatian passport that made the critical difference in his development, allowing the youngster to spend the years from 16 to 18 — the sweet spot in a player’s developmental curve — in Dortmund’s academy, where he matured from a raw American talent into a top European player. In a recent piece in The Players’ Tribune, Pulisic himself also credited his access to a European passport as the key lever (and bit of luck) that contributed to his rapid rise.

Yet those close to Major League Soccer reject the notion that a European club is the only option for America’s top young players.

“I’m not sure it is better for a young player to go abroad right now to become a professional and maybe even to become a top player,” says Fred Lipka, MLS’s technical director of youth player and development. “Maybe five years ago, I couldn’t have told you that.”

Lipka is a serious expert in player development. He previously worked with French clubs Paris Racing Academy and Le Havre, where he helped develop players with elite international pedigrees, including Paul Pogba and Dimitri Payet.

“Our objective right now and in the future is to make sure our best talents have more chances to develop here — domestically in MLS — than to go abroad,” Lipka says.

He cites the increase in homegrowns — players signed from an MLS youth academy directly to an MLS squad’s senior roster — as the biggest factor in the league’s push to become the best destination for domestic players to develop. Players like Tyler Adams of the New York Red Bulls and Kellyn Acosta of FC Dallas are two recent examples of the MLS youth movement, as clubs seek to sign players at younger ages and give them more meaningful minutes with their senior teams.

“At this point, MLS clubs are readier than ever to provide the best environment for players to earn significant minutes when they deserve them,” Lipka says.

For some players, starting a career in MLS hasn’t impeded their ability to play in Europe later.

“For me, I needed to go to college first so I could get some help with laundry on the weekends,” jokes Atlanta United’s technical director and former U.S. national team captain Carlos Bocanegra. “I was just young in the mind, and I would not have succeeded or been able to hang at the pro level.”

After college, Bocanegra began his professional career with the Chicago Fire in MLS before making his way to Europe, playing professionally in England, Scotland, France, and Spain. “My view is that each individual is unique, and they have their own pathway. But there are definitely environments here in America where players are developing at a very good rate.”

Still, despite all of the growth MLS has made over the years, Europe remains the pinnacle for world soccer. Though MLS homegrowns like Adams and Acosta have impressed with their clubs and with the U.S. national team, it’s only Pulisic who has scored goals in the Champions League and has been mentioned in transfer rumors with Manchester United and Liverpool.

“If [our best players] want to leave, I think they should because whether we it like or not Europe is where the top football is being played right now,” says former U.S. youth national team coach and player Hugo Pérez.

Moore’s insistence on Europe for the top young American players has led to some friction between his company and those close to MLS and U.S. Soccer. It’s why one MLS coach walked up to Petersen last year at a youth tournament and asked, “How does it feel for you and Rob Moore to be the most loved and hated people in American soccer?”

The actual tension between Moore and the U.S. Soccer community is less about bruised egos than it is about the structures of American soccer. For Moore’s business to succeed, he needs the U.S. to remain as open a soccer marketplace as possible. Now, when a European club signs a young American player, it is not required to compensate that player’s youth club with a fee known as training compensation. This is not true anywhere else in the world. For instance, if Pulisic had been a youth player at Bayern Munich’s academy and Dortmund wanted to sign him, Dortmund would be obligated to pay Bayern a fee to remunerate the club for their investment. But since Pulisic was coming from the States, Dortmund did not have to pay Pulisic’s youth club, the Pennsylvania Classics, any fee to compensate the club for their eight years of investment in the young American.

Moore sees the relative cheapness of young American players in the world market (they’re basically free!) as a critical factor in his success, and, more importantly, one that he says will benefit American soccer in the long run, allowing more players to develop in ultra-competitive European environments.

“The absolute dagger will start coming in the American context if America ever adopts a system where training-and-development compensation has to be paid,” says Moore, arguing that if European clubs suddenly have to pay around $300,000 in training compensation to a U.S. club in addition to the player’s salary and an agent’s fee for an 18-year-old player “who has never kicked a ball outside of his country,” the pipeline of young Americans to Europe will be reduced to a drip.

MLS academies and the other top American youth clubs contend that this reality makes them fundamentally uncompetitive with the rest of the world and disincentivizes them from investing more money into developing young talent. Although MLS owners have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars ($40 million in each of the last two years) into youth development — building new training facilities, paying full-time coaches and technical staffs, covering long-distance travel to tournaments and matches, and more — if a player at 18 decides to go to Europe, there’s nothing an MLS club can do to stop them. When Schalke signed standout U.S. youth national team player Weston McKennie in 2016 from FC Dallas’s youth academy, the MLS club received no compensation for the nine years of investment they had put into McKennie’s development, money they would then have been able to spend to develop the next generation of McKennies.

“We’re a free market and the kids are able to walk, so that is a really big disadvantage to American clubs compared to the rest of the world,” says Bocanegra. “We’re trying to do our best here to make the league and the national team stronger. Ultimately, it would be great to see clubs provided with training compensation, which will help the overall strength of the sport in the U.S. Hopefully we’ll see that happen soon.”

Moore remains steadfast in his belief that for the top American players — his 0.1 percent — a European environment is necessary. “People get defensive when you’re talking about a minute percentage, but these guys need to be developed at a higher level, for their sake, to maximize their potential.”

Moore’s solution to the training compensation conundrum is to have youth clubs compensated later in the process through higher solidarity payments on transfer fees. For instance, if McKennie were eventually sold to Real Madrid for $50 million, Moore would like to see a chunk of that fee make its way to FC Dallas. It’s an issue that arose recently with fellow U.S. national team star DeAndre Yedlin. In 2014, Yedlin was sold from his MLS club, the Seattle Sounders, to Tottenham, but the Seattle-area club where he played youth soccer, Crossfire Premier, received no piece of that transfer fee. Crossfire has recently taken its case to FIFA to try to collect a solidarity payment, and the governing body’s decision could have huge ramifications for the future of U.S. youth soccer.

“We shouldn’t create barriers to entry on the way in, but give the kid every chance to make it, and if he makes it, then you are going to get rewarded,” Moore explains.

Although he declined to name names, Moore says that some U.S. youth national team coaches have steered players away from his company and toward domestic agents with stronger ties to U.S. Soccer and the MLS community.

“Professional soccer is often about agendas, but it makes me laugh when I hear stories about a club or a coach — when desperately trying to persuade a player to do what they want them to do — then turn around and tell a player and his parents, ‘The agent doesn’t have your best interests at heart,’” he says. “And the person I feel most sorry for is the player because if he is good enough to make a career in Europe, he has then received the wrong and potentially career-changing advice.”

His colleague Petersen was blunter.

“With my experience and background, we could have three to four more Christians now, and we don’t,” he says. “Our environment is too coddled, and unfortunately, there’s an element of our federation being in bed with the MLS in certain situations.”

However, Richie Williams, former head coach of the under-17 U.S. national team, said that the goal for U.S. Soccer was always to have players in whatever place best suited their development. For some, like Pulisic, Europe was the best fit, but others would benefit from college soccer or MLS.

“Even Landon Donovan will admit that when he went to Germany he wasn’t ready for it and didn’t enjoy it, so that’s why he spent the bulk of his career in Major League Soccer,” he said. “And he still was one of the best soccer players we have ever produced.”

So far, Moore’s only big-time American star has been Pulisic. Beyond that, he’s sent the likes of Wright and Taitague to German clubs but they have not yet earned significant minutes for a top-tier European team. For comparison, another agency representing Americans abroad, Wasserman, has had a similar recent success rate. Though not at Pulisic’s level, its client McKennie is earning regular minutes with Schalke, Lynden Gooch is playing with Sunderland in the English Championship, and the agency has just sent U.S. under-17 and under-20 star Josh Sargent to Werder Bremen.

With his first crop of young Americans now spread out across Europe, Moore puts the burden for their success on how well they adapt to the new environment.

“There’s no doubt that the biggest challenge for American players is the change of mentality once you have got your first European contract,” he says. “It’s less of my challenge and more of their determination now. And yes, you can talk them through certain things off the field, but the real desire to make it must come from within themselves.”

Looking ahead, Moore will continue his gambit to remake American soccer, one player at a time, believing that the evidence of his work will be visible when the U.S. men’s national team takes the field (knock on wood) at the 2022 World Cup.

“If I have five or six players that I’ve worked with and helped play a role in their careers on that team, that will give me more happiness than money can buy,” he says. “I would be happy that our company played a small role in pushing the bar a little bit higher and helped more Americans believe that they actually can make it.”

Andrew Helms is a writer in New York.

Andrew Helms