In the summer of 2007, Freddy Adu had reached a crossroads.
He was on his way back from the 2007 Fifa Under-20 World Cup in Canada, at which he’d played the best football of his career – a career now almost four years old, despite the fact he’d turned 18 just a month earlier, and one comprised first of immeasurable hype and latterly of disappointment.
The US had reached the quarter-finals, where they were beaten by Austria. It was a modest run for a talented squad. But Adu has shone brightly throughout, captaining the side as he scored a hat-trick against Poland and dazzled with his trickery and creativity in upset victories over Brazil and Uruguay.
He’d impressed sufficiently that, despite an underwhelming six months with Real Salt Lake in MLS, Benfica made a $2m offer for his services. A fresh start in Portugal with one of the giants of European soccer was an enticing prospect for a player who’d spent a considerable chunk of his young life fighting to justify the hype thrust upon him.
“At the airport after the 2007 World Cup, I was pleading with his agent not to sign with Benfica,” says Thomas Rongen, the former US under-20s coach. “I knew Benfica was too big of a step for such a young player. And it proved to be the wrong move. He got loaned out six times in a four-year period.”
It was a move that also sparked the slow decline of Adu’s career. He would sign – either through loans or permanent transfers – for 13 clubs in nine different countries over a 14-year span. A season-and-a-half return to MLS with Philadelphia Union in 2011 brought promise of a latent realisation of his potential, but such hope was short-lived. Adu’s career wound down through spells in Finland, Serbia and sub-MLS leagues in the US, ending finally in 2021, after two years out of the game, with Österlen FF in Sweden’s third tier.
It was a sad end to a career that, at its outset, had promised more than any other.
Born in Ghana, Adu moved to Rockville, Maryland, at eight when his mother, Emelia Adu, was granted a US green card through the Diversity Immigrant Visa programme, known as the green card lottery. He became a local soccer standout, impressing against older, bigger opponents and was offered a place at the IMG Academy, a preparatory boarding school in Florida where some of the nation’s most promising young athletes are nurtured….