Ready, Freddy?

Each time a new season of Major League Soccer comes around, the people in the media who are actually paying attention usually tell us that it's the league's "make-or-break" year. Again.

However, as its ninth season begins in the spring of 2004, the main talking point will be a 14-year-old boy. Unless you've been steadfastly ignoring all American soccer news for quite a while, you'll know who I mean: Freddy Adu, the Ghanaian-born prodigy who has been fast-tracked through youth soccer, through the USS Soccer Federation's training school, and into the professional ranks, at an alarming speed. He's been signed up to play for DC United, and there's even some talk of him representing the US in the Olympic tournament later this year.

Expectations have gone out of control. On the day of when Adu was selected in the MLS draft, Commissioner Don Garber gushed: "This is one of the most monumental days in the history of American soccer." Garber's deputy, Ivan Gazidis, introduced Adu as "the best young player in the world."

You think they're going a little too far? How about this, from USA Soccer Federation staff coach Juan Carlos Michia: "He is going to change soccer in this country... what Michael Jordan was in basketball, Freddy's going to be in soccer."

Let's look at this in perspective. The Jordan analogy is misguided, to say the least. Basketball was already established as a major sport in the USA before Jordan came along; he just took it to a higher level.

Despite eight seasons of respectable attendance, a level of stability that hasn't been achieved previously in any American soccer league, and the national team's great run in the 2002 World Cup, MLS still has a very small role in the American sports world. Even if Freddy Adu lives up to the hype, it seems very unlikely that one player can catapult the league from this relative obscurity to genuine major league status.

For a start - and this shouldn't be difficult to figure out -- he won't be playing in every game. If he's playing for DC one weekend against, say, San Jose, should we expect all the other games that weekend to attract big crowds?

The precedents aren't very encouraging. Mia Hamm's huge popularity wasn't enough to save the women's pro league, the WUSA. More ominously, the previous men's league, the NASL, foundered largely because the few world-class players in the league were almost totally monopolized by the New York Cosmos. MLS's single-entity structure, with its centrally owned contracts and stringent salary restrictions (the maximum salary is being brazenly waived in Adu's case -- he'll be earning $500,000 a year), was designed with the intention of avoiding this very pitfall.

Now, the fruits of all that good work could be in jeopardy, thanks to the MLS leadership's apparent desperation for a "star." Significantly, there is as much talk about his potential for attracting sponsors as there is about what he might achieve on the soccer field. Here's the DC United GM, Kevin Payne: "I don't think, in the history of our league, I'm not sure that anybody's had a player join a team that has had the marketing clout that Freddy's had."

These people have a bad habit of putting all their eggs into one basket. After a modest start in 1996 and 1997, they pinned their hopes on the national team performing well in the 1998 World Cup, hoping that it would boost the game's popularity across America. The team crashed out in the first round, losing all three games, so MLS had to wait four long years before the next chance. In 2002, the US remarkably reached the quarter-finals, but the league's average attendance still hasn't strayed far beyond its usual 15,000 mark.

Now they're found another lifeline, in the shape of Freddy Adu, and they're clinging to him as if their lives depended on it.

To place this huge burden of expectation on such a young pair of shoulders is very risky, and yet it's going largely unchallenged by the media, who are so keen to play up the rags-to-riches fairytale that they're overlooking the potential dangers. People should question the ethics of allowing someone so young to enter the world of professional team sports.

Some parallels could be drawn with the emergence of the golf phenom Michelle Wei. However, unlike Wie, Adu will be playing in a physical sport, against fully-grown men. Many of them will be relatively low-paid, and quite possibly embittered, journeymen -- who might not take kindly to a kid of less than half their age who is already making far more money than they are. Things could turn ugly.

A more patient approach, with Adu staying out of pro soccer while completing his high school years -- except possibly for participating in the Project-40 development program -- would surely have been wiser, despite the risk of losing him to a wealthy European club after only a year or so in MLS.

Now that he's an MLS player, there's no minor-league or junior team where he can bide his time until he's ready. It's all or nothing.

Of course, all this skepticism may turn out to be unfounded. Freddy Adu will start his pro career near his family's adopted home town of Potomac, Maryland, where the support and guidance of his relatives and friends will be invaluable. His attitude seems to be impeccable -- he has the typical enthusiasm of a teenager, but he shows an appreciation of the challenges ahead of him.

He just might become the best soccer player on the planet, the figurehead of a booming MLS (before bolting for Europe when he's 18), and the star of an increasingly successful US national team. He might inspire millions of American kids from poor backgrounds to take up the sport, helping it to break out of the middle-class suburban "soccer mom" world that it's mainly confined to. He might even reach middle age with his dignity, his sanity, his body and his infectious smile all fully intact. Let's hope so.

But, at this early stage, it's still a long shot. Perhaps Don Garber and Co. should stop making outlandishly premature claims about how great this boy is going to be, and the impact he's going to have. If the Adu phenomenon doesn't come to full fruition, which way will MLS and American soccer turn next?