Everyone has a Cavan Sullivan story. Some involve volleys in diapers or “outrageous” tricks, others bicycle kicks on the beach at age 6. The fables used to spread by word of mouth on the parched fields of Northeast Philadelphia. Now they’re sweeping through American football as Sullivan, 16, slices through MLS. They paint a portrait of a prodigy propelled by supernatural talent, one who’ll soon grace the U.S. men’s national team.
And to some degree, the portrait is accurate.
Sullivan could catch a football and strike a football with either foot at 18 months old.
“Eighteen months,” repeats his father, Brendan, to emphasize the surreality. “It was almost like a Spider-Man moment.”
“He couldn’t talk, he could barely walk, but he literally had a ball at his foot,” says Jack ONeill Jr., a family friend who remembers Cavan toddling around the sidelines of his older brother’s games. “He can’t feed himself, but he’s hitting it with his laces, toe tucked. Like, what the hell is going on?”
He made opposing coaches and observers gawk as he sped through the labyrinth of local football. Cloaked in baggy Adidas shorts and oversized shinguards, he won heated games with headers at age 5; diced 8-year-olds at 6; and won international tournaments aged 7. At 10, “the writing was on the wall,” Brendan says; so Cavan leapt into seventh grade at the Philadelphia Union academy-adjacent school, YSC Academy, and accelerated in order to graduate before football took over.
At 14, he signed a pro contract and agreed to eventually join Manchester City. “I want to be the best ever,” he said. But even before that, cameras flocked to him and scouts raved. At 13, he bossed Arsenal’s U15s — and reprised Alex Morgan’s sipping-tea goal celebration. Then-Union coach Jim Curtin said at the time: “Cavan Sullivan has the ability to become, I’ll just say, a household name.”
But not because of an omnipotent left foot. “He’s not this over-flying supertalent (or) wunderkind,” says Tobias Nubbemeyer, Cavan’s first U-17 coach in Philly. Current and former coaches gush about his burst and his reading of the game, but that isn’t why Cavan was, in the words of Union sporting director Jon Scheer, “the most dominant youth player I’ve ever seen.”
“What separates the good from the greats is a mentality,” says Tommy Wilson, the former Union academy director. “And he has a ‘f*** you’ mentality — excuse my French — that sometimes can be too much for his teammates. But he’s fearless.”
“His outstanding quality,” Union coach Ryan Richter recently said, “is his mentality. He’s not afraid of any moment.”
Cavan — who still lives with his parents at a spacious house in Norristown, a Philly suburb — saw Richter’s quote and asked his mom, Heike, if she agreed.
“Absolutely,” she told him.
“That,” Heike says now, “is his superpower.” It’s a potent blend of confidence, drive, flare and, as ONeill says, “nastiness.”
And its source, according to just about anyone who knows the Sullivans, is familial.
The legend of Cavan, in many ways, begins with the legend of Larry Sullivan, the eldest of nine children reared by a proud Irish Catholic family in a North Philly enclave called Kensington. It was bustling with immigrants from Ireland, Poland, Italy and other football-loving countries. The entire family, Brendan Sullivan says, became “infected by” the sport.
Larry primarily played baseball. But after fighting in the Vietnam War and returning with wounded fingers, he dedicated his life to football and “got truly obsessed,” Brendan says. He coached high schools, colleges, select teams, amateur teams and his sons, all with similar tough love. Brendan, one of those sons, remembers “bathing in (football) every day.” He went on to play in college, at Columbia then Penn, where he met Heike Krippendorff, a captain of Penn’s women’s team. A few years later, they married — and kept playing.
Brendan had stopped by the time they had their first son, Quinn, but Heike continued into her 30s. After stints on semi-pro teams, she played for the amateur United German Hungarians. Brendan would bring Quinn to her games, meet up with other husbands of players, “and we’re in the stands talking s***, razzing the girls,” he recalls with a chuckle. “And the babies are at our feet.”
The babies, of course, were too young to actually watch or listen. “But,” Brendan says, “that’s the kind of osmosis that takes place.”
And that’s the environment into which Cavan was born in 2009, five-and-a-half years after Quinn and two years after twin brothers Declan and Ronan.
Heike had stopped playing by then, but the sport, she notes, was ingrained as “a way of life.” Nearly every night after dinner, the four boys would migrate to their cramped living room and knock around a ball. Sometimes Brendan would sit on the floor and toss it to them. In one home video, down in their carpeted basement, Brendan urges a tiny, shirtless Cavan to “explod(e)” and “snap (at the ball) like a man, hard as you can!” When a smiling Cavan rockets the miniature ball, Brendan booms: “Yeahhh! YEAAAHH!”
There were also mini goals, 2-v-2s and free play. There wasn’t much space at or near their modest home in Bridesburg, a mostly-working-class neighborhood in Philly’s River Wards; but there were always cousins or brothers with whom to compete.
And when it came time for organized football, Brendan explains, “I just recruited dads who I knew would understand the nuttiness of how I would train a team.”
By nuttiness, he means yelling, intensity. The dads, some of whom he’d known since childhood, “were all on board.” They formed the Lighthouse Brigade, featuring Ronan, Declan, Cavan and lots of winning.
Opposing coaches would occasionally ask Brendan, bemused or appalled: “You allow all your parents to yell at their kids like that during the game?” Brendan would respond: “I expect them to yell at their kids.”
“They were like 6, 7 (years old), to be clear,” Heike interjects.
But to Brendan, as long as the parents were avoiding tactics and sticking to “Hustle!” or shouting encouragement, “they’re just teaching ’em the basic foundations.”
“This,” he says of the fervor, “is excited, Northeast Philadelphia. You just are kinda born into it, and it’s all you know.”
Eventually, the Sullivan boys transitioned to FC Delco, a longtime youth powerhouse. But family remained integral to their development. Cavan, for example, would send Brendan “scrolls and scrolls of videos” from practices or matches, asking Dad to help him analyze certain moments, always hungry for improvement. They would go to empty fields, set up cones, visualize movements and sharpen Cavan’s brain to seek out space in various situations.
On one blustery, bitterly-cold Sunday in 2018, everyone at the Union academy was off, so Scheer drove to the academy’s facility in suburban Wayne for a quick workout. He walked past deserted indoor fields, to the gym, no football in sight. Then he looked out the window. The gym overlooked a back field, and there, battling a biting wind, were Quinn, Declan, Ronan and 8-year-old Cavan, all dribbling, passing and shooting, honing their technique, guided by Brendan.
“You could see the coaching there, and how much he demanded from them,” Scheer says of Brendan. “I’ll never forget that.”
Scheer acknowledges that for some young children, the demands could be overbearing; but the Sullivans “just grew up in this scene where football was everything; and being competitive, and trying to win, was second nature.”
“So,” he concludes, “I never had any concerns or doubts. Because when you talk to the kids, they’re just built differently.”
When did Heike realize that Cavan, specifically, was “a little different”?
On a car ride home from a game at age 5 or 6.
“Even though people tell you not to do this,” Heike notes, “we always talked about the game on the ride home.” (“Immediately,” Brendan adds.) And on one memorable trip, Cavan turned to Brendan and said, “Hey, Dad, did you see when I did that move in the corner?”
Cavan went on to explain that he’d seen a Premier League player on TV do the exact same move in the same situation a few weeks earlier, and he’d been thinking about emulating it ever since.
“His mind,” Heike says, “is always going.”
Most of the Cavan lore, then and now, centers on visible traits such as touch and quickness, because that’s what the untrained eye can see. It’s what an old Italian guy saw at Beach Blast, a massive sand football tournament on the Jersey Shore, when he pointed at young Cavan and exclaimed. It’s what New York Red Bulls youth coaches saw when Cavan, who typically played two years up, went to North Jersey with a Union juniors team in his actual age group circa 2019.
In three games that weekend, he allegedly scored more than a dozen goals, and after the umpteenth — a clever flick over a helpless goalkeeper’s head — “I remember him jogging back, with his gold chain bouncing around,” says Richter, who coached that juniors team. “And the Red Bull coach is like, ‘Who is this kid?!’”
In the Union academy, though, coaches came to admire the less visible traits, the “nuances.”
“He was seeing things (on the field) way before I would see them,” says former Union U-17 coach Peter McDonnell.
“His talent on the ball, and his aggressive nature, and being very ball-oriented, that came out right away,” says Scheer, who spent eight years in the academy before becoming sporting director. “But I started to take more appreciation for his learning ability and his game understanding and decision making.”
Some of it, of course, is innate, but much of it was nurtured. When the Sullivans watched top European football on TV, they zeroed in on players from whom the boys could learn. Cavan studied the likes of Alexis Sanchez and Lionel Messi.
He also learned to critique himself. He’d trade clips and thoughts with academy coaches. He’d use unrepeatable “Philly words,” as McDonnell calls them, to review his own mistakes; then he’d vow to correct them.
“He’s got a thirst for information,” Scheer says.
And that thirst adds a layer to the prodigy’s portrait. It helps Sullivan unlock his physical gifts. It feeds into the mentality that distinguishes him.
‘The trick for us was not to blunt the edge’
The mentality, a hunger spiked with Northeast Philly edge and fortified by spunky confidence, is evident on any field Cavan touches.
It was evident early. Around age 4, ONeill says, he would play like “everyone is his enemy.” At 8, Richter says, “the parents of other kids would complain because he was so aggressive.”
And it stems in part from the Sullivan household. With full-time jobs to work (Heike as a lawyer, Brendan as a teacher) and four boys to corral, “you had to be cavalier, and let them fight — until a certain point,” Brendan says. So there were scraps, many scraps; and Cavan, the youngest, learned to stick up for himself.
The fight bled onto football fields. “He would square up to opponents that were twice as big as him,” McDonnell says. At one U-17 practice in early December 2023, during an 8-v-8 drill, Cavan and a Union teammate “just came together like two pieces of metal, sparking, and they grabbed each other by the necks,” McDonnell recalls. (Four days later, they were celebrating goals together.)
Coaches, for the most part, loved Cavan’s fire. But there were times when he crossed the proverbial line. He would go at teammates with the same directness that his dad normalized, and “sometimes, yes, he made destructive comments,” Nubbemeyer says. Coaches instructed him to mix in praise with the rebukes and demands, and Cavan took their advice in stride.
They were careful, though, not to tame his inner dog.
They’d “give him a little bit longer of a leash at times,” Scheer says, “because he is different.”
“The trick for us,” Wilson says, “was not to blunt the edge, but just to put guardrails in, so that he could play with freedom (but avoid red cards).”
The same delicate balance applies to his audacity on the ball, which could break open games but also irk teammates when leading to turnovers.
It also applies to his aura, to all the attention he attracts. When he says he could’ve helped the USMNT against Belgium, or when he scripts a LeBron James chalk-toss celebration, or when he posts his own highlights on Instagram, some see arrogance or self-importance; others see confidence.
“And you don’t want to stymie that,” says Tom Heinemann, who coached Cavan with the U.S. U-15 national team. “Because that’s also what makes him special.”
It’s a self-belief, the type that doesn’t waver when he loses five 1-v-1s in a row. He demands the ball again — and again and again, until he beats his defender.
“A bad moment, to him, isn’t one he loses confidence from for a month,” Richter says. “It doesn’t happen. He fights through it.”
Earlier this season, when stuck on the Union bench, he did get frustrated. “It was a very tough time for him — a really tough time for him,” Heike says. But did it dent his confidence? “No,” Brendan says without hesitation. “He was more angry at the situation.”
So he worked, and worked, and learned what both parents call “an important lesson.” When opportunity finally knocked — when Richter stepped in for the fired Bradley Carnell and told Cavan: “Let’s go. You get your chance now. Take it.” — Cavan smiled and seized it. Since August, with six goals and eight assists, he has been the single most prolific attacker in MLS (ahead of Messi), a creative force, a grown version of the phenom that wowed Northeast Philly.
And he’s making good on his parents’ core command.
“We’ve always approached our kids with: you’ve gotta do the best you can do,” Heike says.
“You were given gifts,” Brendan explains. “Our only job, as parents, is to make sure you don’t waste those. The expectation is you’ll maximize that, whatever you do, whether it’s the cello or math class” — or football.
After two decades of “organized chaos,” the Sullivan nest is empty this week. Quinn, the Union’s 2025 player of the year at age 21, recently moved out. The twins are freshmen at St. Joseph’s University in Philly. And Cavan is in Fayetteville, Ga., at his first USMNT camp, as the face of the program’s “fresh start.”
They are, as Heike says, “at all different levels” of football. And they might someday be in four different locations. But “the brothers have a bond,” as Brendan says, that probably won’t ever be broken — and that forged their football talent as much as football forged it.
It formed first in the Bridesburg basement and at fields throughout greater Philadelphia.
It strengthened on road trips with FC Delco, and later at YSC Academy, the Union-affiliated private school where Brendan teaches and all four brothers learned.
It crystallized in Ocean City, N.J., where the family spent chunks of each July, the one place “where football is not the primary focus,” Brendan says.
They’d still train every day on those long weekends down the shore, often for multiple hours, the parents clarify. But, free from the rigors and pressures of school and their clubs, “summers at the shore were a moment to be kids,” Heike says.
The boys would cram into a single room, sleeping four across a queen bed when they were young. Quinn would venture out with friends and let his brothers tag along — even “when they were little dorks,” Brendan says. The twins and Cavan, Brendan adds, came to see Quinn as something of a “big brother dad.” Both parents agree: Quinn was the “perfect first child.”
But, of course, he was also a competitor.
When the family moved to Norristown, competition overtook their new backyard. They got a Teqball table, as a gift, to go with a full-size goal and other contraptions. The boys would play 2-v-2 in their boots, so often during COVID-19 lockdowns that they chewed green grass into brown dirt.
Nowadays, the grass is green again. When Cavan leaves the Union facility and returns home for the day, there are no brothers with whom to play. High school is done; online college hasn’t yet started. “He’s probably bored,” Brendan says — though he does have Mom, Dad and two Great Danes.
And a ball.
Naturally, football still fills some voids.
A couple weeks ago, Cavan and Brendan were playing in the house and broke something.
Heike snapped: “Enough with the ball!” But Cavan recalled a fruitful promise.
“Mom,” he reminded her, “you said that you’d never yell at us for playing with the ball in the house.”
And he was right. “She,” Brendan says of Heike, “got busted.”
----------