A few days before Christmas, somebody announced on Twitter that Freddy Adu had been released by FK Jagodina without playing a single game in Serbia's SuperLiga. Within hours, Adu reacted, tweeting: "I signed a 6 month contract. And it's done now. I didn't get 'released'. Knew I was leaving a few months ago. #truth."
A response that was equal parts honest, pathetic and poignant captured the very essence of his often bizarre career. The public perception of him has always been at odds with the reality.
To understand why, we need to go back to the start and remember the peculiar madness that once surrounded Adu. The scene was a hotel in Charleston, South Carolina in March, 2004. There was a British television crew in the building and reporters from all corners of America had descended on an MLS pre-season training camp for the chance to talk to a 14-year-old. His team-mates, some of them established internationals, walked past and shook their heads as the media besieged the kid with the diamond studs in each ear and the fluorescent smile.
“Like Pele’s been my hero since I was a kid,” said Adu before quickly checking himself. “I mean I’m still a kid but he’s still my hero.”
He was still 14.
By that point in his life, he had already made the front page of the Washington Post six times, sat on David Letterman's couch, been profiled by Vanity Fair, and had the veracity of his Ghanaian birth certificate verified by Sports Illustrated. Not to mention walking the gauntlet of screeching girls on MTV's Total Request Live and having his irresistible immigrant kid from Africa narrative given the serious news treatment by CBS's 60 Minutes.
Ludicrous fact
Even before he kicked a ball professionally, the whole production had become more about marketing a moment (
Nike
paid him $1m to wear their boots and gained him an audience with the Manchester United squad at 13) than protecting the welfare of a child. And that, everybody involved in propagating the always convenient myth of the phenom seemed to conveniently forget, is what he was. Adu stood barely five foot seven, weighed just under 10 stone and was about to be marked by men who resented the ludicrous fact he was already the highest-paid player in MLS on $500,000 a year.
“It’s like Mozart,” said Pele, rather unhelpfully. “Mozart started when he was five years old. If you are good, you are good, God gave Freddy the gift to play. If he is prepared mentally and physically, nobody will stop him.”
Not everybody reading that quote appreciated that Pele is notoriously prone to hyperbole when there’s money involved, and the Brazillian icon’s Sierra Mist commercial with Adu got its first airing during the teen’s debut for DC United. As with so much of his subsequent career, the synergy was way off that day. After so much breathless ballyhoo, the game was live on national television but Adu started on the bench, underwhelmed upon his introduction, and, looked, inevitably, like a boy struggling to compete against men.
Peripatetic decade
That, more or less, set the tone for much of what came after. FK Jagodina was Adu’s tenth stop across seven countries during a very peripatetic decade and that’s not counting ill-fated trials at outposts like Blackpool, AZ Alkmaar and Stabaek of Norway. Along the way he became a Football Manager video game legend, won 17 caps for the USA, and perhaps only once gave a sustained demonstration of the precocity that had Inter Milan offering to move him and his family to Italy back when he was 10.
The cameo of brilliance came at the 2007 Under-20 World Cup. In his third trip to that tournament, his displays for an American team that made the quarter-finals earned him a move to Benfica, A paltry 11 first team appearances ensued and his years there were punctuated by undistinguished loan stints in Greece, Turkey, France and elsewhere in Portugal.
As his name began to be bracketed with all the failed prodigies of previous generations, the question loomed about where it all went wrong.
Former US international Jimmy Conrad tells an instructive tale about a national team training camp where players on the fringe were being evaluated ahead of the 2006 World Cup. When 16-year-old Adu finished way last in a 20 minute fitness run, even behind two assistant coaches, his colleagues felt he didn't quite grasp the concept of pushing to the limit to impress. Some who shared MLS locker rooms with him have chipped it in with similar stories about an exaggerated sense of entitlement.
In his defence, how could he have been any other way? At 14, he was showered with money, adulation and acclaim of a type not foisted upon any American soccer player ever.
Ridiculous hoopla
Invited to train with United at Carrington, texting buddies with Olympic champion
Michael Johnson
, it would have been a miracle if he didn’t end up adversely affected by the ridiculous hoopla.
Indeed, it’s a testament to his enduring spirit that he has traversed the world from Scandinavia to Brazil in search of opportunities to prove he can still play.
“Attitude is EVERYTHING. Never put a period where God put a comma,” says the tagline on Adu’s Twitter profile. A mantra that a 25-year-old journeyman without a club may need to cling to over the coming years.
