Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: It’s not going so well for Freddy Adu at his new club, Kuopion Palloseura (KuPS) in Finland (OK, everything after the comma is new, but the first bit you recognize).
After signing for the Finnish first-division team four months ago, Adu has not only failed to make the kind of impact in Finland — in Finland — that he was expected to make on the entire world — the entire world — at a teenage prodigy, but he’s failed to even make the substitute’s bench in recent weeks and months.
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According to stats database website Soccerway, Adu has played just 237 minutes this season for KuPS. According to this story on World Soccer Talk, he already has one foot out the door at KuPs thanks to his complete lack of match fitness and desire to apply himself on the training field.
Ever since someone made this every-touch video during his early days in Finland, things have gone downhill, and quickly. It’s become so bad for Adu that he’s been sent down to the club’s reserve team, which plays in the fourth division of the Finnish league system, which, of course, brings us to the above video.
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Here we have Adu, now 26 years old, scoring what is, in all honesty, a very nice free kick. But then you click the rewind button to watch it again, this time noting the general surroundings and Freddy’s — and that of most of his fourth-division teammates and opponents alike — overall disinterest in actually being there.
In a way, it’s hard to believe the one-time Pele-to-be has fallen this far, but then you realize it’s been heading this way for a long, long time. Surely this is the bottom — the very, very bottom — for Adu, and the end is near.