The only trouble with Rossi's American dream is that it's also an American nightmare. Those two goals at the Confederations Cup came *against* the United States on June 15, when Rossi was wearing the famous blue jersey of Italy, the nation of his parents' birth. Rossi's pair of second-half strikes gave the Azzurri a 3-1 come-from-behind personalized jerseys , sending the U.S. into a tailspin that included an embarrassing 3-0 loss to Brazil last Thursday and a tk-tk koming on Sunday against Egypt.In magazine parlance, we use "TK" and "koming" as place-holders for information that we don't know yet. In this case, those TKs spiked my Rossi story. But several aspects of the article are still pertinent today, from Rossi's personal story to the question SI was asking: When will the U.S. produce its first genuine global soccer superstar? To wit:Perhaps the lesson of Giuseppe Rossi's rise to torment the Americans for Italy isn't so much that U.S. Soccer whiffed by failing to land Rossi for the Stars & Stripes -- "my dream was always to play for the Italian national team," Rossi says -- but something else entirely. Soccer superstars are more readily forged in a mature soccer culture, from the earliest age possible.
If you ask Rossi whether he could have developed into the player he has become by staying in the United States as a teenager, his response makes complete sense. "It would have been very difficult," he says in a sharp New customized San Francisco Giants jerseys accent, "because people know that the best soccer is played in Europe, and if a player wants to be the best and to learn from the best, then going to Europe is the best way to go." It's better, moreover, to go early. Several American players have moved overseas in their late teens, but soccer's superstars joined their clubs even sooner: Argentina's Lionel Messi with Barcelona at age 12, Portugal's Cristiano Ronaldo with Sporting Lisbon at 11 and England's Wayne Rooney with Everton at 10.


