At 14, he was recognized as a bona fide prodigy with fairly limitless potential. At 15, he became a professional soccer player and people took note.

Sound familiar?

If Freddy Adu is still burrowed anywhere in your long-term memory, it probably does. Adu is 29 now. But he has become more cautionary tale of teenage hype than a real person still trying to outrun the shadow of the gargantuan expectations dropped on him before he could legally drive, a peripatetic journey that’s mostly been a slog of disappointment.

You probably aren’t entirely sure who the present-day analogue alluded to here is. And that’s very much by design. Efrain Alvarez – who just goes by Efra – is one of the most talented fully homegrown American players to come through in many years. He’s a left-footed playmaker from a working-class Mexican-American neighborhood in East Los Angeles. And he only just turned 16 at the start of this summer. Yet he’s been a professional for more than a year. And with such a precocious ascent comes the usual warnings and anxieties of this post-Adu American soccer scene.

We worried for Jozy Altidore, who is somehow considered an underperformer relative to his promise, in spite of being the national team’s third-leading scorer of all time, with a good chance of claiming the record shared by Landon Donovan and Clint Dempsey for himself. And then we fretted over Juan Agudelo when he scored in his national team debut just shy of his 18th birthday, becoming the youngest USA goal-scorer ever — never mind that he became a solid Major League Soccer contributor.

That’s been the context for all subsequent teenage starlets, or at least until Christian Pulisic became the best national teamer as a teenager and turned the narrative on its head.

It falls to the L.A. Galaxy to shepherd Alvarez’s development, and they approach the task with caution. Sometimes the club offers glimpses of the tantalizing teenager, but mostly it keeps him out of the glare on its reserve team in the unglamorous second-tier United Soccer League.

Born in 2002 – yes, really – Efra is the fifth of six children. His parents migrated from Mexico in the early 1980s and both wound up working as butchers for the same company for the last few decades. His father’s weekends revolved around men’s league soccer, and his four sons tagged along.

The first two went professional. Geovani signed with Pachuca in Mexico but was loaned to Manzanillo, of the second and then the third tier. He only lasted two years. The second boy, Carlos, was the second overall MLS SuperDraft pick by now-defunct Chivas USA out of UConn in 2013 and still plays professionally for the Las Vegas Lights of the USL – where he is, as it happens, Freddy Adu’s teammate.

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Then came Efra, who began kicking a ball just as soon as he could walk. “He always had a little soccer ball around him,” Carlos recalls. “Wherever he went, the soccer ball went with him.”

From the time he was 5, Efra played up against boys 8 or 9 years old. At 7 or so, he was picked up by the New York Cosmos, which then ran a West Coast academy. The story goes that its technical director, the former Manchester United superstar Eric Cantona, was deeply impressed by the boy. Efra was so young he had no idea who Cantona was. When Carlos joined Chivas USA, Efra moved over to its own academy. And when Chivas folded, he wound up with the Galaxy.

There, too, it was instantly evident that there was something about Efra. As Carlos tells it, when one of his youth teams went to train at FC Barcelona’s academy in some kind of exchange, the Catalan juggernaut hoped Efra would stay. But his parents were in no mood to uproot the entire family after working so hard to build a life in Los Angeles.

In his final season in the Galaxy’s academy, mostly as a 14-year-old, Efra led the Galaxy’s under-18s to the U.S. Soccer Development Academy championships, the biggest prize in youth soccer. He scored in the quarterfinal, semifinal and the final. He was ready for the next level.

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