Phenoms

The South American Under-20 Women’s Football Championship (which serves as CONMEBOL’s qualifiers for the 2018 FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup) is underway in Ecuador with Brazil looking to secure their eighth-straight championship in the tournament’s eighth edition. 

The junior Seleção are exceedingly dominant in this competition, and the 2018 staging of the contest has been carried out in much the same vein. Brazil topped Group B play with four wins from four matches, scoring 13 goals while conceding zero.

Ballou Tabla is making history as the first academy player from the Montreal Impact to make a move to Europe. The 18-year-old attacking midfielder completed a transfer to Barcelona on Thursday. He’ll join Barcelona B.

24-year-old Englishman Ravel Morrison appears to be finding his feet in Mexico after arriving at Club Atlas on loan from Italian side Lazio last August. The former Manchester United prodigy had a stop-start beginning to life in Liga MX, but he’s now scored three goals in his last three appearances for Atlas.

On Sunday, January 14, Morrison opened his Clausura account with a stunning free kick against Pumas. 

Just days after rediscovering his love for soccer and putting his professional career back in motion, Freddy Adu has popped up in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that Adu is a trialist with USL expansion club the Las Vegas Lights.

It seems like Freddy Adu has been everywhere and done everything. The 28-year-old former phenom has played in the U.S., Portugal, France, Cyprus, Turkey, Brazil, Serbia and Finland.

Now that he's done everything and taken some time away from soccer, he's going to go back to doing stuff.

Amidst an influx of impressive young talent coming to Major League Soccer from South America, the Bundesliga is raiding the U.S. for young players. So while American teenagers may not be having any luck breaking into lineups at home, they’re finding more opportunities in the league of the world champions. To steal a line from Taylor Twellman, what are we doing?

Aged just 16 years, five months and two days (for comparison’s sake, Lionel Messi was 17 years, three months and 22 days), teenage Catalan phenom Claudia Pina made her league debut for FC Barcelona Femeni Sunday in the club’s 2-0 victory over Zaragoza.

Pina has been a revelation for Barcelona throughout her La Masia rise, and her exploits for Spain at the U-17 level have been remarkable, to say the least.

You might’ve forgotten about Ousmane Dembele following his 20-game layoff due to a thigh muscle rupture, and that’s OK. Really, missing that many games accounts for roughly 20 percent of the kid's career so far. 

The fallout to the Jonathan Gonzalez switch from the U.S. to Mexico has been immense. We’ve covered it here and here. Simply put: The U.S. appears to be failing in its pursuit of identifying and recruiting Mexican-Americans to compete for the national team. But the possibility of a Timothy Tillman switch is proof U.S.