Back in 2004, in the eighth week of the Major League Soccer season, D.C. United played the Los Angeles Galaxy. The game itself was not particularly important, but many fans in the stadium were hoping to catch a glimpse of D.C. United’s rookie midfielder, Freddy Adu, who was already being touted as the savior of American soccer.

In the game’s sixty-seventh minute, Adu delivered. He collected the ball on the right side of the field and dashed past a Galaxy defender to the corner of the eighteen-yard box. With a second defender directly ahead of him, he slowed—only for a moment—dropped his shoulder, feigned right, and moved left as the defender stumbled over his own feet. A third defender approached, and Adu, with the ball seemingly tethered to the bridge of his left foot, pushed it away from the goal while wrapping the inside of his foot back around the ball only milliseconds after. The defender, fully turned around, lost sight of Adu as he redirected the ball, and his body, back toward the face of the goal. A fourth defender lunged forward, a final attempt to dislodge the ball from the magnet that Adu’s feet had become. Adu feigned again, lifting his right arm behind his body as if to shoot—but then stutter-stepped past the defender, now watching, helplessly, from the ground. About sixteen yards out from goal, Adu planted his right foot, pulled back his left, and brought that foot forward to strike the ball past the outstretched arms of the keeper and into the top left-hand corner of the net. All of this happened in about five seconds. Freddy Adu was fourteen years old.

I was fifteen, and watching the game on television. I remember thinking that this is what we had been waiting for. “We” meaning American fans of “the beautiful game”— o jogo bonito,_ as the Brazilians call it—a style of soccer that had eluded us for so long. We lived for the double step-over that turns a player’s legs into small windmills, feet moving from the inside to the outside of the ball in quick succession. Or the Cruyff Turn,_ in which a player drags the ball between his legs, allowing him to change direction before a defender is able to respond. Or the roulette, in which a player, running at full speed, spins his body three hundred and sixty degrees atop the ball in graceful synchrony. Adu moved with this kind of grace. It was exhilarating to watch.

There was another “we_”__ _I thought of as well: black boys, who might not have to look across the ocean any longer to see a global soccer star who resembled one of us. America had never had an international black soccer superstar. We had stars, to be sure. Cobi Jones and Eddie Pope had been the faces of the M.L.S. during their time, but neither made his way to success on the world stage. Earnie Stewart and Tim Howard spent a number of years in Europe but never quite secured a place among the true global élite. My childhood room was decorated with posters of black players from other countries, filling the space American players did not: Thierry Henry, Jay-Jay Okocha, Didier Drogba. I was proud of them in ways that felt familial, no matter how different their worlds were from mine.

Supporting black professional athletes was taken seriously in my home. When I was thirteen, watching the 2002 World Cup in our family’s living room, my parents would come in and ask, “Which team has the most black players?” We counted the small men scurrying about on the screen, and whichever team had the most melanin was the one we would all cheer for. In other sports, we followed a similar tradition. When Venus or Serena Williams played in the final of a tournament, we gathered around the television to cheer on the sisters in a sport we otherwise spent little time watching. When Tiger Woods reached the final round of a major, we fist-pumped alongside him. There is a solidarity that black people can find in celebrating the athletic success of our own, especially in sports where our existence is sparse.

It was the same with Freddy. At my public school, in New Orleans, many of my friends, most of whom played basketball or football and had little to no interest in soccer, gaped at the quick succession of step-overs he would use to leave his opponent in the dust. Soon, because I was the only black soccer player many of them knew, they called me Freddy whenever I did anything remotely impressive on the field. Sometimes I found myself mimicking Adu, doing step-overs and jukes and spins just to hear the adulation from my boys on the sidelines.

Our closeness in age had something to do, certainly, with the kinship I felt with him. I wanted him to succeed, just like I wanted my friends to succeed. But I also knew how different Freddy’s world was from ours. As my friends and I debated prom dates in the lunchroom, Freddy was in a high-profile relationship with the teen-age pop star JoJo. While we were mowing lawns on weekends to save money for the movies, Adu was starring in Nike commercials with Pelé. (The soccer legend once likened Adu to Mozart.) In high school, I made the all-city and all-state soccer teams. Meanwhile, Freddy became the youngest player in the history of American sports to sign a professional contract. While my professional ambitions seemed like a distant fantasy, his name represented brands like Pepsi and Campbell’s Soup. Still, I thought, Freddy could have been one of us. He seemed goofy and carefree, and concerned with playing the game he loved—how we saw ourselves.

Then the hype around Freddy began to subside, and it happened quickly. During his early years in D.C., Freddy’s flourishes on the field were sporadic, and there were locker-room rumors about his work ethic and immaturity. When he struggled to get time on the field, Freddy complained to the media, and D.C. United suspended him for a game during the playoffs. Despite making amends with his coach, Peter Nowak, Freddy still never worked his way into the starting lineup with any consistency.

A couple of years ago, Adu reflected on some of the mistakes he made early on. “As a fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-old,” he said, “you’re young, you’re immature, and you kind of get caught up in that a little bit . . . And maybe I wasn’t training as hard as I should have. And it hurt me.” The interview is striking in its candor; you can feel the weight of Freddy’s disappointment in himself. “What most people don’t know is that I decided to go pro because my family was real poor,” Freddy said. “My mom was a single mother working two jobs, three jobs. What am I gonna do? Say no to millions of dollars while my family is struggling? No.”

We’ve seen players in other sports make similar calculations. In 2004, Kwame Brown, a top prep prospect in basketball, decided to forgo college for the N.B.A. to help his family out of financial troubles. “I don’t want to do this,” he recalls telling Billy Donovan, who had recruited him to the University of Florida, in Jonathan Abrams’s book “Boys Among Men.” “If I’m the number one player taken, I know the expectations. I’m not ready for this.” But the perniciousness of poverty lies, in part, in the decisions it forces people to make. For Brown, passing up the fortune of a professional basketball career would have, almost counterintuitively, been a selfish act.

After three seasons with D.C. United, Adu was traded to Real Salt Lake. There he reunited with his former coach John Ellinger, from his youth-national-team days, and it seemed like this might be the fresh start Freddy’s career needed. That summer, Adu found the global spotlight again, at the U-20 World Cup, when he scored a hat trick against Poland. His first goal came in the twentieth minute, after his teammate Sal Zizzo deftly stole the ball from an opponent just beyond midfield. After dancing in between two Polish defenders, Zizzo passed the ball ahead of him to Adu, at the top right-hand corner of the eighteen-yard box. With a defender approaching from his left, Adu slowed for a moment, then quickly stepped over the ball, moving his left foot counterclockwise in the ball’s tight province. The Polish defender was slowed, but not beaten. So Adu, in a moment that looked as if it could have been an accident but was too precise to have actually been so, did a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pirouette around the ball, and gave it two light touches away from goal before curling the ball into the far post, where it coiled its way past the goalkeeper, knocking in off the inside of the post. “It is stunning! Absolutely stunning!” the British commentator rejoiced. After the tournament, Adu signed with Benfica, one of Portugal’s strongest and most storied teams.

As I watched that game against Poland, I was particularly struck by the moments in between the goals. The nimble touch effortlessly flicking the ball to a teammate in his periphery. The forty-yard pass across the field that reached a player beyond the horizon of the television screen. These moves felt like glimpses of Freddy’s potential. They were also the very sort of thing that makes soccer difficult to embrace for Americans who haven’t grown up watching the sport: the goals are not what define the game, they are simply the synthesis of its parts.

But the next several years were turbulent ones for Adu. Benfica’s coach was fired, and Freddy struggled to find a system that could match his unique talents. He bounced around, playing for nine different clubs across seven different countries, including Serbia, Finland, and Turkey. In 2015, Freddy joined the Rowdies, in Tampa Bay, in a league roughly akin to the minors in baseball. This past December, it was reported that Adu was once again in search of a new club. The Portland Timbers of the M.L.S. gave him a tryout, but Adu left after two weeks, without being offered a contract.

I’ve been wondering since what it means to have your identity predicated on something you can no longer do. After high school, I earned a scholarship to play Division I soccer at a small school in North Carolina, but I didn’t get much playing time, which forced me to determine who I was beyond the field, something I had previously never had to do. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about whether Freddy Adu ever lost a sense of who he was because of who he failed to become.

At twenty-seven, Adu should be entering his prime as a player. Instead, his future as a professional is uncertain. At some point, of course, every child star ceases to be a child. And when the commercials stop airing, and their names fade from our memories, they cease to bear the burden of our projections. It’s then that we’re left to ask why we had to put so much weight on them in the first place.