Perhaps we could emphasize Da’vian Kimbrough’s uncommon situation—this summer, the 13-year-old California lad became the youngest person to sign a professional soccer contract—from a demographic standpoint. According to sociologists who study such vague and unofficial designations, Kimbrough, born in 2010 and having just missed Generation Z, appears to qualify as a member of something called the Alpha Generation.

That puts him quite apart from Japan’s 56-year-old Kazuyoshi Miura, reportedly the oldest still-active soccer pro in the world, who is on the Generation X roster. Italian keeper Gianluigi Buffon, still going strong at 45, is at the most recent end of the X crowd. And there’s Argentine superstar Lionel Messi, 36. A Millennial. Or Gen Y’er.

And as long as we’re throwing these inexact labels around, might the Alpha-Gen Kimbrough now be marked as an up-and-coming Alpha Male, defined as a fellow tending to assume a dominant or domineering role in his chosen field.

For context, consider the case of Freddy Adu.

In late 2003, Freddy Adu similarly was summoned from the kids’ table to join the grownups. He was 14, signed by D.C. United of Major League Soccer, which made him, at the time, the youngest soccer pro ever. (In keeping with the generational thing, Adu, now 34 and retired from the sport, is a Y.)

Unlike Kimbrough, whose contract agreement with the Sacramento Republic of the second-tier United Soccer League was not widely reported, Adu was introduced at a New York City press conference months before his first game with United. He was guaranteed a $500,000 salary, highest among MLS’ 240 players at the time, and had a $1 million Nike endorsement deal but reminded that “I am just a kid” and that his mother probably would drive him to team practices.

Adu was welcomed to the sport by no less than soccer’s all-time wizard, Pele, who declared that Adu reminded him of the genius composer Mozart, “who started when he was 5 years old,” Pele noted.

(Pele was of the Silent Generation, by the way, which followed the Greatest Generation and led to Baby Boomers, which came before…. Well, point made. Mozart, who lived in the late 1700s, apparently missed the Awakening Generation and is more accurately situated in the Classical Period of music eras—between the Baroque and Romantic periods. But that’s another ballgame.)

Anyway, Adu’s own status as a prodigy quickly appeared to have legs. In his April 2004 MLS debut, Adu became the youngest athlete to participate in a major U.S. professional team sport since a pup named Fred Chapman, at 14, pitched for Major League Baseball’s Philadelphia Athletics 117 years earlier.

Chapman never played another Big League game, but Adu, in his second game, drew a national TV audience and sell-out crowd to Washington’s RFK Stadium. In his third game, against the MetroStars at the old Giants Stadium, Adu scored his first goal—and said he would celebrate by just hanging out with his mom.

He did not go on to enduring Mozart- or Pele-like greatness, playing in a handful of tournaments with the U.S. National Team but mostly spending his 15-year career with lower-level teams in Europe, though he wound up with a reported net worth of $12 million.

Kimbrough has not yet played a game for Sacramento, instead assigned to the club’s youth development academy. Between Adu and Kimbrough, a couple of other 14-year-olds—Francis Jacobs, in 2019, and Maximo Carrizo, in 2022, slightly lowered the age of youngest to sign pro soccer deals, though they also remain with their team’s youth programs.

Of course, all these wunderkind developments spice the ever-evolving world of sports. And they remind the rest of us, and probably Kazuyoshi Miura, of bygone generations.