London

The news about Freddy Adu was as sad as it was inevitable.

Adu, the youngster who became an instant millionaire when he turned pro with D.C. United of Major League Soccer at age 14, is struggling to find any team to give him a chance.

Freddy the phenom is now the forlorn. The adolescent star, hyped by Nike as America’s own imported Pelé, has turned 21. He has washed up in Denmark, where F.C. Randers, a club in ninth place in the 12-team national league, was quick to tell The Associated Press on Monday that it had no plans to employ him.

He is there simply to train, to stay in shape, to keep the flicker of his game alive.

It would be cruel, and ridiculous, to give up on one so talented and so young. Yet Adu’s career spiral looks decidedly more like Nii Lamptey’s than Pelé’s.

Lamptey was the wunderkind plucked out of Ghana at 15 to play for Anderlecht in Belgium. That was the start of an odyssey that took an obviously gifted, utterly ill-prepared young man through a sputtering career in 12 countries, from Europe to China and back to Africa, through the 1990s to the mid-2000s.