This year’s Major League Soccer Cup final was overshadowed by two pieces of news, writes Gabriele Marcotti of the London Times. While the Houston Dynamo and the New England Revolution battled it out for the right to be called MLS champion, the rest of the world wondered about Freddy Adu’s mysterious two-week training session with Manchester United, which was at first denied and later confirmed by manager Sir Alex Ferguson. The other big piece of news, of course, was the approval of the so-called “Beckham Rule.” For the future of the U.S. national team, U.S. soccer hopes Freddy Adu makes the move to Manchester United. For the future of its domestic league, MLS hopes that allowing each MLS team spend as much as it can afford on one player will entice the likes of Beckham, Ronaldo and Luis Figo and other stars in the twilight of their careers to come to MLS. But Marcotti says that what U.S. soccer really needs is to “produce its first big, bona fide superstar and, until recently, all the chips were on Adu’s 17-year-old shoulders.” Skeptics say Freddy isn’t ready for the English Premier League. His development since signing with MLS at age 14 has been slower than sponsors and big clubs anticipated. The boy who was compared to Pele was supposed to feature at this summer’s World Cup (he would’ve been the same age as Pele), but Bruce Arena squashed any talk of his World Cup participation talk early. Adu has many good qualities but he hasn’t physically developed, which would be a tremendous problem for him in the EPL-perhaps the world’s most physical league.