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Report: Adu not offered contract at Blackpool

SadFreddyAdu (ISIPhotos.com)

Photo by ISIPhotos.com

By DAN KARELL

Freddy Adu’s bid to join a new club in 2014 has suffered a setback.

After spending the last three weeks training with English League Championship side Blackpool, Adu was not offered a contract to play with the team for the rest of the season, according to the Blackpool Gazette. Blackpool have allowed Adu to remain with the club in order to train and keep his fitness levels high as he searches for a new club.

There is nothing happening with Freddy,” Blackpool interim manager Barry Ferguson said. “He’s come in and worked hard with us. He is a great lad but I’m more than happy with what I’ve got. I have a strong squad.”

Sources have told SBI from the start of Adu’s stint at Blackpool that his time there was always planned as a training stint, and not a formal trial. He has been linked to potential moves to Turkey and Norway.

During his time training at Blackpool, Adu has took part in two closed-door scrimmages. In an interview with Blackpool FC’s Youtube channel, Adu said that a mutual friend connected him and Ferguson.

Adu has been a free agent since Brazilian club Bahia mutually terminated his contract last November. The 24-year old has played with nine clubs as he enters the tenth year of his professional career.

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What do you think of this report? Where do you see Adu heading next? Think he can be successful with a club in Europe?

Share your thoughts below.

Comments

  1. It is a tragic laugh but LOL….it must have been the video. I hope he can turn it around some day but until then, put your head down…show some humility…do the work to become a better footballer….stop doing interviews and learn to play defense. Become the best player you can and hope that is enough.

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  2. IMHO,…Norway is not a good option. Although he may want to reconnect with Bob Bradley,…is the Norwegian league a good fit for Freddy? I don’t think so. Isn’t the league known for being a physical/tough league? Also,…do you think Bradley wants to make his first potential U.S. signing Freddy Adu? If it goes wrong,…the club may be wary of any additional U.S. players might be inclined to bring along.

    MLS would be the better route provided Freddy agrees to a low salary ($100K or less), which would make taking a chance on him more appealing.

    The dude needs to settle into a club for a few years and get on the field. At this point, it looks like there are no suitors for the not-so child prodigy.

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  3. The Swami predicts that Freddy Adu will be signed by the Cosmos, play like an all-star in the Open Cup and play mediocre ball the rest of the season.

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  4. I second the notion that simply reposting the comments from the first Adu story would save a lot of time and trouble. Has there ever been a subject where so many people claim to know things that they could not possibly know (for example how Adu practices or how he played on his various loans around Europe)? And, sadly, so many of the posts reveal more about the posters than about Adu and most of the revelations are not flattering.

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      • If it’s fact, then post a link to the source or at least give the source, otherwise don’t claim fact because, let’s face it, a lot of times people who claim fact without sources are full of it or are a bit gullible themselves.

      • Not clear by what you mean by “public record” Much of what appears in the media could be said to be in the public record, but it’s not true. I have yet to see anything where some one was willing to go public with the tales you reported, that is, say them in public. If you could provide some documentation, some backup for these stories, that would be great, but I doubt you have any.

  5. Whatever, the man is hustling, really that is all that can be asked of him.

    It would have been hard for him to get a work permit anyways.

    Hopefully he gets a shot in Turkey where he had his most successful professional stint.

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  6. jesus, if it’s not haters poking fun or saying he should quit soccer, it’s self-appointed life coaches telling him to ‘stop acting so entitled and lazy’.

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  7. He lacks professionalism, is lazy in practice and doesn’t want to track back. We know he’s not a 90 minute player. Therefore, it wouldn’t make sense for a low budget team in MLS or English Championship to spend alot of money on him. Adu does have have some amazing technical ability and can make stuff happen in the final 3rd. If I owned a large club, I would throw some money at Adu and use him as a 30 min sub.

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  8. Somebody once said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

    If you want to get a break, bust your tail until one comes. Make yourself valuable. I am not a hater, in fact i always root for this team to be the place he finally figures it out. Maybe the next one….

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  9. The Cosmos should get him! Sennna could be a good on the field mentor and Savarese could also provide some serious proffesional attitude, something that Mr Adu seems to lack. The time is running out for the “next Pele”. and what a way to make a splash on “Pele’s team”!!

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    • If he has major league ambitions he needs to be in a major league situation. But the Cosmos would be the sort of stunt he’d try rather than the sensible route.

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      • right because second divisions everywhere else in the world were seriously “major league”. I wouldn’t want him on my club, but NY Cosmos are hardly a step down for a guy that cant land a club of PT from 9 teams in 10 years.

      • He played at Philly and was productive. As I’ve said a jillion times, he’d be a solid MLS pro and fairly productive if he’d accept a MLS solid pro’s paycheck and work a little harder. The problem is he wants DP money to stand around and be moderately effective. He’s not an absolute bust, he’s overly ambitious and needs to correlate pay to production, at which point he will play. But the sort of team that will pay what he apparently wants will expect more than he will give. Catch 22.

    • This makes so much sense not to happen. Somebody get the English rags on the phone. Start the gossip.

      Get Frank Underwood to meet with Savarese and mention Freddy Adu. By then, all the news outlets will have picked up on it, so it has to happen.

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  10. Why would any team sign him? At this point his only option is to come back to the states and either play for the minimum contract in MLS or be signed on the cheap by an NASL team. After burning through all of those teams and basically being told by the Union to never come back his career is pretty much over. Since 2007 the following players all have more competitive professional games than Adu. Stuart “Knee” Holden, Jonathan Spector, Michael Parkhurst, Maurice Edu. The only person to that has played less than Freddy in the last 3 years is Jonathan Borenstein.

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  11. He’s like that guy who can’t keep a job, lives with his parents, and always says I got something big coming up but each is a failed venture.

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    • He needs to approach one of these opportunities like it’s something he’s earning for hard work as opposed to “guess who you just won.” These are agent’s opportunities, not a thought out career arc or humble placing of nose to grindstone.

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  12. Wouldn’t it save us all a lot of time if SBI just saved all the posts from the first Adu story of the year and then pasted them in under all subsequent stories? Poor Freddy’s basic script hasn’t changed in quite a while.

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      • As a non-Mexican, he’s not good enough for Liga MX to decide to build their whole attack around him. He needs to play for a team, no matter how crappy, that will let him run the show and then prove that he can be a success at that. Expansion MLS team, USL, 3rd division, whatever… just get lots of playing time. period.

  13. Come back home Adu. Training with Blackpool is a good move for development and fine tuning your technical abilities but you need playing time and consistency……Come back to where it all started, DC United. Supplying Eddie Johnson and Fabian Espindola while in the mix with Luis Silva, a Healthy Chris Pontius and Nick Deleon, United will be a force to be reckoned with……..Ben Olsen can you hear me?….Ben?….lol.

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    • I think it was a poor move because Blackpool CYA’d themselves — the trial/train semantics — and he was unlikely to get the work permit. He wastes valuable time in the MLS preseason (and others). He can show up when it’s nearly MLS season now, but he may or may not be the same fitness level, who knows what his salary expectations are, and he’s out of sync with the group. Which results in the same Show Pony Syndrome he’s been fighting all along. I think if he wants to stick and earn respect he needs to show up for camp with the group and win their confidence, not act like he’s special and ambitious.

      There is also the potential of another Philly/Bahia or Gabe A situation where he just wanders around teamless for a while. This may make sense to some agent looking for an angle but I don’t think this helps him as a player one bit. This is pretty much finishing off his USMNT Brazil chances, if he had any. He’ll be working into fitness about April and by that time the coaching staff will have made 99.99% of camp decisions (which, on top of the loyalty issue, is why I think the injured Chandler gets passed).

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    • you’re being sarcastic right? the next Pele? wouldn’t he have already done that by now if that were true? what is he like 27…… time’s running out for this lad. im not sayin he’s good nor bad, just dont compare this guy to Pele, it doesnt make u sound knowledgable

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  14. I wish that I knew the full story about Adu. He obviously has the skills to play the game professionally, but has not been successful at all. Locker room issues, training issues, what’s going on with him?

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    • Bean …

      It’s about professionalism and fitness. Adu has NEVER had either.

      1) Benefica moved him along after he was repeatedly late for training and meetings not to mention he was a notorious late night party guy.

      2) At Aris, much of the same which culminated in Adu missing a team flight during the play-offs.

      3) Then, there’s the famous story of when Arena invited him to his 1st USMNT camp. His fitness level was so bad that the asst coaches beat him during fitness tests.

      Right now, he’s a marginal pro with a decent skill set.

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      • Everything points towards a theory that maybe he was one of those without accurate a birth certificate and was several years older than presented. He was dominating the youth ranks and attracted the attention of US scouts. I think it’s a scam.

      • In Philly we have a large African population, having spoke with a few they told me that only the population in the large cities received birth certificates. The others are “compared” to them to attempt to determine age when they enter schools. As Freddy is undersized, it is very probable that he was placed with a youger age group then is actual age.

    • I don’t about of the professionalism or fitness issues, but I think his problem is that at the youth level, where he had the most success, he played as an advanced offensive center mid, with little defensive responsibility. He was so good offensively that the teams he was on figured it was a good tradeoff and built their offenses around him.

      When you move up to the pro/men’s international level, you can still have someone playing that position, but that someone better be really, really good. Adu just wasn’t dominant at the adult level and wouldn’t/couldn’t adjust his game to be successful in another role.

      I had something similar happen in my “career” when I moved from youth/high-school to college. I was used to being a classic number 10, running the show, and not having to do much defensively. At the college level, I wasn’t good enough for a team to make me the center of their attack, and I didn’t have the athletic ability to transition to being more of a two-way, box-to-box midfielder. I tried, but I could only get to being a passable starter at that position, not a real difference maker. I see the same thing with Adu.

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      • Makes a lot of sense. Adu would probably prefer to play as an attacking midfielder and they are something of a luxury in today’s game, but…

        When Adu played for DC United he usually was an outside midfielder in a 3-5-2 meaning that he had to run end line to end line and play both offense and defense. He was quite good at it and after he left, DC United never found anyone nearly as willing or able to play the position. So perhaps we ought to avoid the facile notion that he can’t or won’t play defense.

  15. It was never going to happen at Blackpool. The club is having financial problems and Adu would’ve had to have been “off-the-charts” good to have been given an offer. I though BF’s comment about Blackpool being a strong squad were a bit laughable as they are fighting relegation and have literally have no offense.

    As for Adu, I’ve said it a million times … he lacks professionalism. He’s simply never fit. He can’t run at max effort for 90 mins. These are traits that have been with him since he turned pro.

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    • you know this because you train with him? or are a current/former teammate? if not, shut your pie hole and stop with the lazy assumptions.

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      • No need for nasty name calling …

        See my comment below.

        The Aris incident and the USMNT incident are both documented. No arguing that.

        As for Benefica … one of my good friends worked in their PR Dept.

      • I love this line of counter-argument: “If your friend worked for the PR department then you would never make a spelling mistake.” Brilliant sleuthing there KC!

      • You can see it on TV. I don’t need to train alongside him to see he ain’t skinny, doesn’t run around on defense and clatter people, and often Coca Colas (sits there and opens a Coke instead of running into support) his home run passes.

        He has some technical gifts but not incredible ones relative to senior players, and in the modern game you need to be, if not athletic, a hard worker. He could be a solid or even above average MLS player if he kept his nose clean in the locker room, lowered his salary demands, and replaced ambition with work rate.

      • so i guess juan mata “lacks professionalism. He’s simply never fit. He can’t run at max effort for 90 mins.” i mean, i can see it on tv!

      • i’m thinking if i have to explain to someone that comparing a couple very specific aspects of two individuals’ playing styles *does not* equal comparing those individuals’ overall talent levels, i might be wasting my time.

      • (a) Mourinho did question Mata’s effort and then run him out of CFC.

        (b) Mata is a high quality attacker — much more so than Adu — justifying to many teams and coaches any downside of defensive effort. A la Valderrama — you can goof around if you are perceived as sufficiently valuable. If you aren’t sufficiently valuable you will just be called lazy because the upside will be less.

        (c) So you can’t just isolate a trait and say, it’s ok for x ergo ok for y. Brad Davis used to stink on fitness and defense and had to be covered for by a fit LB. Once he got fit and played tougher on defense he became useful as a LM to all levels because he goes from one trick pony with liabilities to solid pro with left wing upside. If I have to explain…..

      • (a) mourinho is an @sshole who will say anything to justify what he wants to do, and he never wanted mata for his system.

        (b, c) obviously mata brings more to the table than adu, which is why i was dismissive of kimi’s reply trying to compare talent levels.

        my argument with you is that if you can take those 3 TV “eye-tests” and say that, if player x doesn’t pass them, then obviously he “lacks professionalism [etc.]”, then you should be able to apply it to player y with the same conclusion.

        so please, tell me more about how juan mata lacks professionalism and isn’t in shape.

  16. Ouch. Poor guy, he said it he doesn’t want to be a celeberty he just wants to be a professional but he can’t break thru. Who knows whats next… How about

    The Turkish D2 team or maybe Stewart can save him with a contract at AZ

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  17. Sadly, Adu was likely never getting an offer to play for B’pool. He won’t obtain a permit because of his lack of regular first-team football and his exile from the USMNT. He still needs an attitudinal adjustment, he needs to go somewhere where he can get consistent PT, keep his head down, and play hard. Adu is still at the bottom of a tall mountain. He’s got the ability to climb it, but he still hasn’t seemed to figure out that nothing is going to be handed to him anymore.

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    • I agree with most of what you said but what is up with you and others talking about this so called ATTITUDE adjustment?? If it were a problem why would a club let him continue to train…. which means he can still play with the reserves.

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      • Yeah I think some people assume that just because he isn’t good enough there must be some attitude issue. Dude is just a hard fit, he’s a bit too small to play in some formations and not quick enough to make up for the size difference. He’s not even a great winger, which is where you can hide smaller guys from the hustle and bustle in the middle of the field. It’s a hard fit and not really one I would expect from a championship team like blackpool.

      • He was suspended by the Union for his attitude. It could be a poor work ethic or something along those lines, but it is still an attitude.

  18. Here we go again. He will probably land in the lower division of another league and he will say that is where he wanted to play all along, do well, then try and secure a transfer to a better team, obtain a transfer, sit on the bench or not dress, and move on again.

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  19. What now for the guy? Sheesh! I hope he finds something and something consistent. Go to a lower level team, go to the Cosmos or something, and play hard!

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  20. Never would have gotten a work permit anyway, so probably for the best.

    he should try Mexico, the style of play would suit him well there.

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