Cole Campbell is still adjusting to it all, and he’s had to do so on the fly. Life has been one big change lately. All for the better, he’ll tell you, but even good change can be challenging to navigate – especially as an 18-year-old.
The young dual-national is already thriving with a giant club, recently making his debuts for Borussia Dortmund in both the Bundesliga and the Champions League. He’s playing at one of the world’s best talent factories, which is a pretty damn good place to be, isn’t it?
But the most unexpected adjustment of all? The attention. It can be overbearing. It hasn’t quite reached that point for Campbell, but it has been … different. The social media posts, the Instagram highlight reels, the interviews, the hype – he sees it, he knows it, he feels it. Six months ago, he was a rising Iceland youth international. Now, he’s something very different.
Very suddenly, Campbell has become American soccer’s next one up.
Across all sports, the U.S. is a country continuously looking to anoint its next young star. We’ve seen it happen time and time again, including multiple times at Campbell’s own club. Christian Pulisic and Gio Reyna have ridden their own hype machines straight to U.S. men’s national team stardom, and the expectation is that Campbell is next. The eyes of American soccer are now fixed on a player with just 74 senior minutes for Borussia Dortmund.
“I’ve been training for such a long time with no one watching, and now that everyone is, I’m just confident in my abilities,” Campbell tells GOAL. “Even if there are people watching, it doesn’t really make me nervous. Obviously, it is so much different now, where I’m being followed and everything, but as far as that, I don’t really feel much pressure. Obviously, I now have to perform and do well when I step on the field, but really, I just feel joy whenever I step on the field. I don’t really feel too much pressure, I just enjoy it.”
For several of his predecessors, such pressure has proven too much. For others, it’s been what’s sharpened them to push the game further than those that came before. Pulisic is the model case. Like Campbell, he arrived at Dortmund as a kid with big dreams and, in the years since, he’s become a world-renowned star unlike any American before him.
Now, it’s Campbell’s turn. He’s living with that pressure well, largely because Campbell expects even more from himself than others do. Everything that American soccer fans are dreaming of, well, he’s dreaming of it, too.
“My goal was to debut in the Bundesliga and eventually the Champions League,” he says. “Now that I’ve done that, I’m just trying to work hard and obviously earn more minutes throughout the rest of the season. That’s my short-term goal. As far as long-term goals for my career, I want to win a Ballon d’Or. That’s something that I want to do in my career. I want to win the Champions League and I want to win a World Cup as well. That’s something that would be absolutely amazing and I think that, in the future, I think it’s all possible.”
Campbell is still new to this and, as good as he’s been so far, it remains almost impossible to predict the future of an 18-year-old. He’s still far from a finished product and he still has a lot of learning and growing to do before he reaches the expectations that those on the outside have thrust upon him, let alone the ones he’s now putting on himself.
He’s still adjusting, but Campbell truly believes anything is possible.