Sporting Kansas City's Gianluca Busio aiming to chart his own path amid interest from Europe

Outside Red Bull Arena, the clinks of Coronas, a blaring Bad Bunny track and the anxious frenzy of juggling circles score the dusk.

Inside, a sprite with copper-tinged hair skates around his contemporaries in hot-pink cleats: Sporting Kansas City midfielder Gianluca Busio, still weeks shy of his 19th birthday.

Sporting KC boss Peter Vermes had an edict for "Bus" (his nickname, pronounced "Boose") at a practice earlier in the week: "Cause havoc." It's something of a mantra for the wunderkind from Greensboro, North Carolina.

"I didn't have stuffed animals, I had little soccer balls," Busio tells ESPN about his childhood. "My brother dribbled around the house before I could walk. As soon as I could, I was [off] and kicking."

In 2017, Busio became the youngest player since Freddy Adu to sign a Major League Soccer contract, at 15 years, 2 months and 28 days. He soon wanted a tattoo but was too young; his mother, Dionne, conceded that whenever he scored his first goal, he could. Less than 180 minutes of playing time later, Busio found the net.

Fine, Dionne reasoned, make it three next time.

Dionne thought he'd be 18 when that happened, but just before he turned 17, Busio became the youngest in MLS history to score in three straight games.

Suffice it to say Busio's body of work (in the literal and figurative sense) has been rendered a canvas in constant evolution. Dionne has stopped setting benchmarks for her son.

"He came out ass-backwards and has been doing everything ass-backwards since," she joked.

It's hard to disagree. Most don't leave home to embark on a professional sports career at 14. Most also don't earn the awe of one of the most important names in American men's soccer history before they can vote.

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"I had this plan for him [coming in]," Vermes says. "Preseason with us, training with us, two or three weeks with our second team.

"By the time preseason was done, I had to tear up the plan. He was [already] more than good enough to be around the first team."

Most aren't the second-youngest American to make a Gold Cup roster in United States men's national team history.

"His time has come," said U.S. coach Gregg Berhalter recently, ending speculation about Busio's international future when he sent him on in the 62nd minute of the team's first match against Haiti.

In less than 30 minutes on the field, Busio completed 90.3% of passes and came within inches of a debut wonder goal for the ages, a half volley beckoning the upper 90 that forced a save. He thrived on and off the ball, single-handedly controlling the pace of a United States side expected to make the final.

As Busio is wont to do.

He may just as soon see the field overseas; sources close to negotiations say a transfer could be completed by next week, with teams in Italy, Portugal and Belgium vying for his services.

One could be forgiven for thinking Busio has come across a prodigious rabbit's foot, but, if you ask him, it's all going according to plan.

"I have to move," a 14-year-old Gianluca concluded, the words confounding his parents.

Having been discovered at a regional tournament by UConn recruiting czar and coach Mike Miller while with the North Carolina Fusion, Busio had just returned from his first youth U.S. Soccer camp call-up. He'd befriended George Bello, Giovanni Reyna and Joe Scally, the Atlanta United FC, Borussia Dortmund and Borussia Monchengladbach products, respectively. They'd discussed U.S. Soccer's developmental academy system, how it replicated European academies and provided a built-in pathway to professional soccer in the United States.

Busio's future crystalized in front of him.

"It was his first time playing with [those guys]," Dionne remembers. "He's like, 'I gotta do this. I gotta play with guys like this all the time.'"

In the late 1980s, Dionne worked as a server while earning a bachelor's degree and Ph.D. from UNC Greensboro. One day, a technician for an Italian textile company, who frequented his company's hub in Greensboro, walked in. Dionne told her friend she'd marry Alessandro at first sight. Thirty-two years and three kids later, they're still together.

"I grew up in the South Bronx; he's from Italy," says Dionne Busio, who parlayed those degrees into a career as an assistant professor of family and childhood studies at Appalachian State University. "Small world."

Alessandro wasn't much of a player, but he poured his passion into Gianluca and his older brother, Matteo, who played at both UNC Greensboro and Charlotte.

"He stills tells me what to do," Busio chuckles. "If I score a hat trick, he'll tell me, 'Good job, but next time, score four.'"

Kismet worked its magic on Dionne and Alessandro but left them unprepared for their youngest to concoct a plan at odds with everything Dionne had worked toward. And so their 14-year-old son laid out for them how being in an MLS team's academy would put him among the country's best players. It would allow him to devote more time to soccer, and the path from amateur to pro would be built in. He researched academies, found contacts and put them in touch with his parents.

"I have to move," was where he landed.

"I said, 'You're 14. Be quiet, go do your homework,'" Dionne recalls. "I had to sit on him to get him to clean his room, but this stuck. This was all him."

After meeting with Sporting KC, Seattle and Philadelphia -- and turning down academy opportunities with Fulham and Manchester United -- Busio favored SKC for their track record of players coming out of their academy, like Erik Palmer-Brown and Steven Enna, who play at Austria Wien (on loan from Manchester City) and FC Fredericia in Denmark, respectively.

He'd move 1,000 miles west and live with a host family. Busio, half Black, half Italian, would live with a white family, the Tiedts, in the Bible Belt. Dionne's sister called up yelling: "How could you send your baby across the country?!"

"I just said, 'You got to have faith,'" Dionne says. "I didn't want to leave the raising of my child to someone else, so we were very involved, but they were God-sent. It was like [Gianluca] gained two more parents."

Busio, who still celebrates birthdays with the Tiedts, smirks hearing about Dionne's fretting. "They thought they had four more years with me."

When Busio arrived in Missouri, his poise shocked some of his new teammates.

"He's like Spider-Man," Vermes says. "'With great power comes great responsibility.'"

"He was unbelievable on and off the field," Honduran international and Sporting KC midfielder Roger Espinoza says. "A very humble kid. He works hard, wants to do well, and you see it every day in practice."

Graham Zusi, the Sporting KC legend and longtime USMNT spark plug, still remembers the day Busio signed.

"A 15-year-old kid signing with the first team? It just wasn't normal," Zusi says. "But he was always playing and acting beyond his years. It's a humble confidence when a guy wants to just soak up every ounce of knowledge he can."

Austin FC's Matt Besler, then Sporting KC's skipper and coming off 2014 World Cup stardom, had a more personal connection to Busio in those early days: personal driver.

"His host family ended up being less than a mile from where I lived," Besler says.

Besler would pick up Busio for practice in his Ford F-150 and do radio interviews -- "Maybe that made me seem old" Besler chides -- to and from their training complex.

"He was just so mature for his age," Besler remembers. "Just had this quiet confidence. He has the quality, talent, puts in the work and just keeps getting better."

Both Vermes and Berhalter point to Busio's adaptability as what sets him apart from players his age, domestically and abroad.

"Wherever he plays on the field," Besler says, "it's like he's played there his entire career."

"We watch a lot of youth games," Mike Senkowski, Busio's agent at Octagon since his first days as a pro, says. "When you see a player with so many different skill sets, they pop out."

"For him to be able to [play] six different positions on the field really well and understand [the] nuance [for each position]?" Vermes posits. "Him being able to do that is just incredible for his age."

Busio knew with his frame -- 5-foot-7, 140-ish pounds -- he'd never body people off the ball. He'd have to be smarter and quicker to keep up. "I'm not a freak athlete or anything," Busio says. "I was always good enough on the ball, I could keep up technically. That's what I leaned on for a while."

"Leaned on" might be a stretch.

Zusi, who recently missed almost half a year recovering from left foot surgery, says that while rehabbing, he was blown away watching Busio's progression.