There’s something about a 16-year-old making his debut among fully grown senior professionals that makes him look like a fawn. A scrawny, wobbly baby deer, the function of his arms and legs not yet figured out, jogging on to the pitch in a kit and shin guards that always seem a few sizes too big, like a boy wearing his dad’s suit.

So, too, appeared Mathis Albert when coming on in the 88th minute of Borussia Dortmund’s 4-0 romp over Freiburg on Sunday, which secured the team a place in next year’s Champions League.

While he barely had a touch of the ball, Albert got on the field at 16 years, 11 months and five days old. That made him three months younger than Giovanni Reyna had been in his debut in 2020, who in turn beat Christian Pulisic’s 2016 record for the youngest American to appear in the Bundesliga by two months. They all broke the record in a Dortmund jersey which Albert, remarkably, is the seventh American to wear.

Albert was born in Greenville, South Carolina just weeks before the United States men’s national team stunned the world at the 2009 Fifa Confederations Cup with their run to the final – and their fateful 2-0 lead over Brazil in the title game before collapsing.

Europe’s biggest clubs and talent incubators were after Albert from the time he was 13 and playing in the LA Galaxy’s youth system, reportedly attracting the interest of Bayern Munich, Ajax and Paris Saint-Germain as well as Dortmund. Mathis has a French father and a German-American mother, giving him easy access to a European passport. And when his father was offered a job in Germany, the family followed in 2024, circumnavigating Fifa’s rules on underaged players moving countries for the sake of their careers.

By last summer’s Club World Cup, Albert, then just 16 years and 24 days old, was on Dortmund’s traveling roster in the United States, although he did not appear. He has, however, played in the Under-17 World Cup with the US and has since moved to the U-19 level.

Albert is possessed of a teenager’s propensity for posting painfully artsy pictures on Instagram. Also: pace and a knack for beating his man. Not unlike Pulisic and Cole Campbell, another American teenager on Dortmund’s books but on loan at Hoffenheim, he is a zippy, dribbly winger. This is little surprise as Dortmund has long functioned as a kind of open-air sanctuary for these types of players, rescuing them from the strictures and forces of modern soccer that seek to eradicate them.

Predictably, Albert’s debut sent the American soccer crowd aflutter.

We’ve got another one, folks! A prodigy at Dortmund!

This early excitement is a function of several overlapping fixations. One: a desperation for a true global men’s soccer superstar who holds an American passport. We still haven’t had one, after all. Our very best players are now good enough to reach the brand-name clubs at the top of the European ecosystem, but they still don’t seem to amount to more than very reliable role players. Weston McKennie may be the most useful player at Juventus, shuttling between every position but goalkeeper and center-back, and showing well in them all, but he’s not The Old Lady’s best player. Even when Christian Pulisic led Milan in scoring last season, play didn’t run through him, and the team wasn’t built around him. (And that was all before his epic and ongoing 18-match-and-counting scoreless drought for club and country.)

Then there is the obsession in both global soccer and American society to fixate on what, and who, is next. We are forever peering into the future and what glories may lie ahead for prospects whose ceilings and accomplishments can’t be predicted with any kind of accuracy.

Yet as a soccer nation, it’s clear the US has grown competent at producing precocious teenagers who are credible and competitive at some of Europe’s bigger clubs. But they seem to top out at that point.

This is a numbers game. It takes a handful of really promising prospects to yield one world-class player. This is the raw arithmetic of sport at the elite level, an immutable law that commands blood sacrifice in the form of shattered hopes. In order for one gleaming [insert the name of the superstar of your choosing here] to roll off your assembly line, the machine must first be fed a half dozen guys who at one time were seen as just as talented but whose names nobody ever needed to learn.

In the way that the French don’t freak out whenever yet another breathtaking sprite emerges and the Spanish don’t seem to bat an eyelash at seeing a teenager play in La Liga, it feels like the development of American soccer talent won’t have truly arrived until the emergence of a Mathis Albert is practically a non-event.

• Leander Schaerlaeckens’ book on the United States men’s national soccer team, The Long Game, is out on 12 May. You can preorder it here. He teaches at Marist University.