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946 liverpool drakt Fausto There was a pivotal moment in Christian Pulisic's £58 million ($73m) transfer when Chelsea officials smuggled the American and his father Mark into Stamford Bridge to convince him to move to west London. As ever, Chelsea's negotiation team was led by Marina Granovoskaia, who got the deal done. However, their New Jersey-born chairman Bruce Buck was on the charm offensive and revealed to the Chelsea Mic'd Up Podcast last week that 'actually, Christian visited here.' Chelsea's long list of charitable aims extends to the United States where they work with an innovative inner city academy in New York City called FC Harlem. Buck called up his friend Irv Smalls, the executive director at FC Harlem, to come to London to covertly meet Pulisic. A big part of the reasoning was that the former Major League Soccer (MLS) legal executive could connect with the United States' most valuable-ever player due to their shared upbringing in Hershey, Pennyslvannia. It was Pulisic's second visit to Stamford Bridge having come with his sister and his father to tour the stadium in 2006 when the club won the Premier League under Jose Mourinho. However, he had also visited Anfield, Old Trafford and White Hart Lane. He was in the UK due to his mother, Kelley, having a one-year teaching exchange in a village close to Oxford. He spent most of his life in Hershey and it was at U.S. Soccer Development Academy club PA Classics where he honed the skills that attracted Dortmund. Making it in the U.S. is very different to what European players go through, and the Development Academy (DA) allowed him to reach the national stage before attracting Dortmund. As a football coach, Pulisic's father was perfectly placed to help him make it in an incredibly competitive environment. However, Chelsea have now partnered with Smalls with his vision to see the same opportunities given to inner city kids like those in Harlem with wider reform also on his mind. The Pulisic deal was notable because he was one of a kind. Both of his parents played futsal; Christian himself played futsal in Detroit while his father managed a team there and then spent time living in Europe. There were also the trips set up by his father to play in Europe, including time in Barcelona's La Masia academy. His Croatian passport gave him two further years development at a top club that other U.S. nationals might not get. There needs to be more stories like Pulisic's from a country so used to sporting excellence and which is hosting a World Cup in six years. It may take re-visiting the system and activating communities like Harlem to see a Pulisic alongside a Hudson-Odoi-type player while wearing those stars and stripes. Smalls is now motivated and driven with a clear purpose of providing a quality grassroots-to-pro-football development pathway for the untapped disadvantaged youth of urban America: "It is so easy to dismiss our communities and say you can't, you won't, you don't have and you will never have because of this, that or the other.