And Then a 13-Year-Old Entered the Game…
And Then a 13-Year-Old Entered the Game…
Real Salt Lake prodigy Axel Kei made his professional debut at an even younger age than Freddy Adu. Now what?
Did you feel it too?
A shudder down your spine, quick but unmistakable? Back on the night of Oct. 8?
If you did, you’ve probably been a fan of American soccer long enough to recall the frenzy surrounding Freddy Adu’s professional debut with D.C. United at the age of 14 in the spring of 2004. And, as such, you likely also witnessed his slow, painful spiral from presumptive heir to Pelé all the way down into irrelevance, the central character in untold cautionary tales.
On that Friday night, at Zions Bank Stadium in Sandy, Utah, the Real Monarchs—Real Salt Lake’s second-division affiliate—made a 61st-minute substitution. The longtime U.S. national team striker Bobby Wood left the game. In his place strode on number 85, Axel Kei, born in the Ivory Coast and raised in Brazil.
All of 13 years old. To be exact: 13 years, 9 months and 9 days. Barely a teenager.
It didn’t make him the youngest professional debutant of all time. Colombian veteran Radamel Falcao was only 13 and 199 days when he first played in Colombia’s second division in 1999. A decade later, the Bolivian Mauricio Baldivieso reportedly got into a game there before his 13th birthday. Meanwhile, a Dutch 18-month-old apparently signed a 10-year contract with VVV-Venlo in 2011 as a PR stunt. (How does an 18-month-old actually sign something?)
Still, Kei became the youngest man or woman—if you can even say that of a 13-year-old—to appear in American professional sports at any level. The previous record was held by Ansuh Kanneh, who played for the Phoenix Rising in the same league. Inevitably, speculation about Kei’s “real age” quickly sprung up on Reddit. The same kind of speculation that dogged Adu early on in his peripatetic career.
RSL understood that the comparisons would be made, yet felt comfortable putting Kei out into the spotlight.
“First of all, he doesn’t even know who Freddy Adu is,” says Arnold Rijsenburg, director of coaching in RSL’s academy. “I told him, ‘Listen, people are going to look at you differently. People are going to treat you differently. But for us, the most important thing is: stay the same.’ You’re Axel Kei, period.”
If Kei is expected to stay the same, that is only possible because Major League Soccer is wholly different now from what it was in Adu’s day. The latter was expected to be the face of a struggling circuit, forever paraded in front of cameras and sponsors. Kei, on the other hand, spends his days cloistered in the RSL academy, going to school and practicing, existing largely within the club’s padded bubble of infrastructure and support staff.
Rijsenburg, who is Surinamese by way of the Netherlands and Belgium, coached Chelsea superstar Romelu Lukaku as a 14-year-old in Anderlecht’s youth academy. Then he worked with other future world-class players like Axel Witsel, Marouane Fellaini and Christian Benteke in Standard Liège’s youth teams. So he has a pedigree with highly-touted prospects.
Rijsenburg sees lots of similarities between Lukaku and Kei in their early physical development and their uncommon size and athleticism. But he refuses to speculate about Kei’s potential. There isn’t any use, he figures. Because Rijsenburg says that when they were Kei’s age, he couldn’t say for sure whether Lukaku or Witsel would even make it to their clubs’ first teams, let alone grow into Belgian national team stalwarts.
And the point of elevating Kei, who is technically on RSL’s youngest youth team, the under-15s, to the Monarchs wasn’t to announce his arrival as some kind of mega-prospect. It was entirely developmental.
“If you’re too strong in your own age group, if you score 50 goals with the under-17s, what’s the use of it? Why would we stop a boy from progressing?” Rijsenburg says. “We need to make life on these boys as tough as possible in the sense of [providing] a challenge every day. We felt that it was the right time.”
Kei played in the LA Galaxy’s affiliate academy in San Diego before joining RSL’s academy. This summer, he won the Golden Boot as he led RSL to first place at the under-15 MLS NEXT Cup with five goals, including a hat-trick. Then he scored six goals in six games for the under-17 team.
When weighing up the benefits of blooding Kei at the next level against the glare of the spotlight and global headlines, the club deemed him ready to test his skillset among professionals. It wanted to measure where he stood, assessing its own training methods, after carefully preparing him. But it also made clear to him that just being there was enough.
“We are expecting nothing,” Rijsenburg says. “We just want to give him a taste of what is possible. We want to see if we are on the right track working with him. There are no expectations for a 13-year-old boy. … No pressure at all. If it works out: hey, fantastic. If it doesn’t work out, that’s fine for us as well. You’ve still got 6-7 years’ time to grow.”
Since then, the club has shielded Kei from the media. It would have preferred that he slide into the pros entirely out of the view of the press. But that isn’t realistic in a soccer biosphere obsessed with talent and Next Big Thing status. Because a story like Kei’s hits all of our soccer culture’s erogenous zones: youth, promise, obscurity, latent stardom and potentially big transfers.
“Of course there are concerns,” Rijsenburg concedes. “Thirteen years old. All this media attention. The only thing he needs to do is enjoy his football. That’s what we tell all our academy kids: ‘Your only worry is that your school work is done and that you’re on time and work as hard as possible at the training sessions. Period. The mental health of the kids is our highest priority.”
Kei isn’t the only underaged prospect from RSL’s academy, which has produced 53 professional players, to take the step up to the Monarchs recently. On Friday, 15-year-old goalkeeper Fernando Delgado started in goal. The club believes that this made him the youngest professional goalkeeper to start a game anywhere in the world. In a rude welcome to the pros, an opponent punched Delgado in the face late on in a testy game.
The club has no stated expectations for Delgado. Just as it doesn’t for Kei. It understands that the player development business is a numbers game and a long game.
“Maybe next season he says, ‘You know what? I don’t want to play football anymore,’” Rijsenburg says of Kei. “These are things that happen. Or he meets a girl who doesn’t like football. Let’s wait and see.”
