But is he the real thing? Mellor, Fulham's goalkeeper in their 1975 FA Cup Final defeat by West Ham and now one of the coaches on American soccer's national youth development scheme, just tells you about the first day a skinny 12-year-old rolled up at their camp in Bradenton, Florida.
He had heard all about this amazing Ghanaian boy who had come to America as a seven-year-old when his family won a Green Card lottery and begun by staying at the Maryland home of his uncle, Tony Yeboah, who'd been a bit tasty himself in his Leeds heyday.
'My English scepticism said 'I've heard it all before',' recalled Mellor. 'But the first thing he does is play a pass first-time, quite blind, chipped with the outside of his right foot straight into the path of a team-mate. Within two minutes of seeing him, I was just drooling 'Oh my God'.'
Nothing surprises Mellor now. 'The blinding speed, close control, vision, deception, tactical awareness. He's got it all. Last year, Bruce Arena, the coach of the US national senior team, told me he was good enough to play in his team already.'
Mellor thinks he can cope with the fame because of a solid team around him, headed by mum Emelia, who once turned down a $750,000 offer from Internazionale for her son's signature and instead held down two jobs to support Freddy and his brother in the US.
The top European clubs will have to wait until he is 17 and completed his MLS apprenticeship. Adu, though, already insists England is a preferred destination. Chelsea and Manchester United are supposedly still in pole position.
Yet how can a 14-year-old, mature for his age but still only a slender 5ft 8in and 10st, survive in a man's game? One DC teammate, Dema Kovalenko, vowed: 'We're going to have to protect him. If someone hits him, we're going to have to be there for him.
'In pre-season games, he took a couple of hits and got up. I think he will be fine.'
That's because of a hardness forged on dusty streets in Africa. 'In Tema (the port where he was born), I played in bare feet, surrounded by broken bottles and other stuff and I played against the men too,' Adu recalled recently.
'In America, I didn't like it at first. It was snowy and no one seemed to play soccer.'
Fortunately, a schoolfriend told his sports-loving parents about this amazing ball juggler he'd seen.
Ah, but whatever did happen to that baseball kid Fred Chapman? Supposedly, he got smashed out the ball park for five innings and then wasn't heard of again.
Just a reminder, perhaps, that sometimes this fuss over precocious kids can turn out to be much Adu about nothing.
