He was supposed to be the next Messi. He played seven minutes for Milan. He retired at 23.
The Mastour story is not a cautionary tale about hype. It is a story about what the machine does to teenagers who get processed too early.
At fourteen he was on every YouTube highlight reel. At fifteen Milan signed him to a senior contract. At sixteen the press was writing about how he would inherit Italian football. At seventeen the loans began. At eighteen the loans got worse. At twenty he was in Greece. At twenty-three he was done.
The football world's instinct is to ask what went wrong with the player. The harder question is what went wrong with the system that produced this trajectory. He was not the first teenager to be over-marketed. He will not be the last. The machine that produces these careers does not learn.
Mastour himself has spoken about this with surprising clarity. He has said he was rushed. He has said he was promoted before he was ready. He has said he did not have the support to handle the attention.
The coverage of his career was the coverage of a product. When the product failed to deliver, the coverage moved on. Nobody followed up. Nobody asked what could have been done differently. Nobody asked whether the press itself had been part of the failure.
His story belongs in the curriculum of every academy that wants to claim it cares about player welfare.