Malik Tillman’s bloody right foot sewed up a World Cup win 24 years in the making

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The right foot that sewed up the U.S. men’s national team’s first World Cup knockout win in 24 years looked like it might need some stitches of its own Wednesday night.

Malik Tillman, the soft-spoken author of that exclamation-point goal, was addressing the media following the Americans’ 2-0 win over Bosnia when reporters clocked the ripped, blood-soaked sock on his right foot. Was this why he swapped out his right cleat in the second half, shortly before curling home the instantly immortalized free kick?

“Yeah,” Tillman replied. “My shoe was cut, so this is why I changed the boot.”

How did that happen?

“Someone stepped on me.”

Ouch. Well, this match was surely a highlight, throbbing foot and all. Where does the game rank among his performances?

“Pretty low, to be honest.”

Right. Wait, what?

“I wasn’t satisfied in halftime, especially because of my set pieces,” Tillman said. “But a World Cup knockout stage game, scoring a goal, it’s of course amazing.”

That’s Tillman. The 24-year-old midfielder speaks somewhere between a whisper and a mutter. Ask him a question, and there’s a good chance he’ll sheepishly giggle, as if he’s tickled by every topic. His responses tend to be quick and a bit off-kilter.

But on the field, he’s utterly assured. The clever passer already was the skeleton key the U.S. used to unlock defenses this tournament. The fact that he scored his 82nd-minute insurance tally with a bloody right foot? It propelled Tillman from unsung hero to cult favorite with one ripple of the net.

“I’m sure he’ll feel it the next day,” midfielder Weston McKennie said of the beat-up extremity. “I’ll try to convince him to put some rubbing alcohol on it.”

As the Americans clung to a one-goal lead in the round-of-32 clash, after Folarin Balogun’s red card reduced the home side to 10 players, it was the quietest player on the field who sent the stadium — and bars and watch parties and fan zones across the country — into deafening euphoria. Sprinting to the corner, arms outstretched and tongue wagging, Tillman disappeared into a mob of red-and-white-striped teammates.

“I’m a different type of person on the pitch,” he said. “Of course, maybe you don’t really see my emotions. But then if you score a goal like this, I think also you guys saw my emotions. So it’s a great feeling.”

Tillman bided his time before breaking out on the World Cup stage. The German-raised son of an American father and a German mother, he committed his international allegiance to the U.S. ahead of the 2022 World Cup but, at 20 years old, was one of that squad’s final cuts. He made the Copa América squad two years ago but played only one minute as the U.S. fizzled out of that continental competition.

It was last summer that he entrenched his place in the American lineup. Tillman starred for the U.S. at the CONCACAF Gold Cup, and those flickers of influence started flashing more frequently. He scored his first U.S. goal, and a second and a third. (He also sealed a $41 million transfer from Dutch power PSV to German stalwart Bayer Leverkusen.) As his conviction grew on the field, so did his comfort in the program.

“He just wanted to feel like he had a place,” U.S. captain Tim Ream said. “He’s a quiet kid, but he’s just come on leaps and bounds. … It was just a matter of finding the calmness and him believing in himself.”

Midfielder Tyler Adams added: “He’s really come to life and grown as a player and a person with this group. So that just shows the maturity of him, who he is as a person, what he really cares about. I think some people sometimes get it twisted — that [with] how nonchalant he is sometimes that he doesn’t care. He cares so much.”

When Tillman spoke before practice Tuesday morning at PayPal Park, the soccer stadium next door to San Jose’s airport, his quiet tenor and the jet engines created a comical scene as journalists thrust their recorders ever closer to his bemused face. But when Tillman took the field for training a half-hour later, he looked downright giddy while chasing the ball with an omnipresent smirk.

“He is a more reserved guy,” defender Antonee Robinson said. “But he gets on the pitch, and he feels comfy with the ball at his feet.”

Playing alongside Adams and McKennie in central midfield, Tillman delivered a master-class against Bosnia the next day — his own harsh self-assessment be damned.

Tillman orchestrated an early half-chance when he collected the ball, spun around and accelerated ahead in one smooth motion. He picked out teammate Christian Pulisic with a cheeky back-heel pass in the box that nearly set up a goal. His defensive pressure created a Balogun tally off a turnover that was ruled offside. Shortly before halftime, Tillman’s deflected through ball set up another Balogun strike — and this one counted. Not known for his defensive prowess, he led the U.S. in tackles.

“He’s everywhere on the field,” Ream said, “doing the dirty things but then making hard things look easy.”

Then there was the fateful free kick. Standing over the set piece from 20 yards out, he conferred with Robinson before taking five steps back and facing a wall of five Bosnian players. “I thought they were going to jump and that he should go under the wall,” Robinson said. “But then he was confident in himself to get it over.”

For good reason. After a deft stutter step, he casually strode toward the ball and clipped a shot that rose above the Bosnian heads and dipped in the net. That Bosnia goalkeeper Nikola Vasilj got a lunging hand to the ball made no difference.

“I know some guys doubted me to go over the wall,” Tillman said. “But I practiced this.”

That much became clear after the match, when many a U.S. player attested to Tillman’s penchant for staying late at practice and sneaking in some extra set-piece reps. “I’ve seen it after training,” goalkeeper Matt Freese said. “It’s a special ability, those free kicks, and he’s worked so much at it.”

It’s a skill that could come in handy again when the Americans face Belgium in the Round of 16 on Monday night in Seattle. Sure, it’s hard to imagine Tillman repeating a feat — scoring directly off a World Cup free kick — that hadn’t been done by a U.S. player since the 1994 tournament on home soil. But for all of Tillman’s humility, the gentle game changer isn’t afraid to think big.

“I’ve been dreaming about this game,” Tillman said. “I’ve been dreaming about maybe taking a free kick — and scoring a free kick.”