Christian Pulisic scored twice for AC Milan in a 5-1 home win over Cagliari Calcio at San Siro on Monday 11 May 2026, his first brace in Italian football, ending a 134-day scoring drought that had stretched back to a Boxing Day-week fixture against Hellas Verona on 28 December 2025. The American captain had passed the 100-day mark in early April as a substitute in Milan's defeat to Napoli , and registered only an assist against Torino on 13 April in the intervening weeks. Coach Stefano Pioli started him in his preferred left-channel role rather than from the bench, the first selection signal that Milan's staff judged the form trough to be over.
The Serie A 2025-26 Capocannoniere race, the top-scorer award, now reads Lautaro Martínez seven, Pulisic seven, with two matchdays remaining. Lautaro is Inter Milan's captain and was Argentina's captain at the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar. Neither Milan club is in this season's title race, which means the personal scoring race is the editorial weight on the closing fortnight of the Italian top flight. Cagliari, the Sardinian side beaten 5-1 at San Siro, sit mid-table and offered the kind of opposition that lets a forward in form translate it into a scoreline rather than a goal.
Pulisic settled the captaincy question on the deadline week. Mauricio Pochettino names the United States World Cup 26 on Tuesday 26 May, with five unresolved selection problems on his desk in April . The captain's form was the one selection problem visible to every American viewer, and the one that could not be dressed up in tactical language. A drought that ran through every other cover week of the season ended on the deadline week before the squad reveal. Pulisic told Time magazine, which put him on the cover the same week, that he planned to score goals and dismissed drought questions as bad ones.
The knock-on is that Pochettino's published selection puzzle now has four problems rather than five. Centre-back competition, Gio Reyna's fitness after five club minutes since January, the midfield pairing and the four-versus-five-back system all remain. The friendlies against Senegal in Charlotte on Sunday 31 May and Germany in Chicago on Saturday 6 June sit either side of the squad announcement, which means Pochettino is picking blind on those four and integrating afterwards. The 90 minutes against Cagliari were the one window in which a player could audition into the 26 by playing in the right shirt; Pulisic took it.
