VICTOR OSIMHEN: THE BOY WHO CAME FROM THE GUTTER AND CARRIED A NATION ON HIS BACK

Before the goals, the trophies and the fame, there was a boy in Lagos trying to survive.

There is a version of Victor Osimhen that football has taught us to recognise.

The striker.

The celebration.

The explosive runs.

The goals.

The Nigerian who plays with the intensity of someone fighting for every last breath.

But there is another Victor Osimhen — one that exists long before the stadium lights come on.

That Victor grew up in Olusosun, Lagos, in a one-room home with his father and six siblings, beside one of Africa’s largest landfill sites. His mother died when he was only two or three years old. His father later lost his job and took work washing dishes at a police department kitchen, but even that was not enough to keep the family financially secure.

Football was not initially an escape.

Survival came first.

When Osimhen wanted football boots, he and his friends searched through the dump for discarded ones. Sometimes they found a left boot. Hours later, perhaps, a right boot.

Different brands. Different sizes.

It did not matter.

They had something to play in.

That detail tells you almost everything about the boy Osimhen was becoming.

At around 12, after the electricity to the family home was disconnected, Osimhen remembers sitting beside a gutter, crying and asking God what kind of life this was for a child.

Then he stopped playing football.

Not because the dream had disappeared.

Because his family needed food.

His sisters sold oranges. Osimhen sold bottled water in Lagos traffic, carrying boxes on his head and sprinting between cars before the traffic lights changed.

Football training was replaced by another kind of training: survival.

He would work whenever there was money to be made. He sold things on the street. He worked around a church. He even did soakaway work, climbing down into deep wells to earn money.

Everything he earned went back to his family.

Some nights, he slept in church because the family home barely had a roof.

This is the part of the Osimhen story that disappears when we reduce footballers to statistics.

We see the millions.

We don’t see the years when he had almost nothing.

We see the superstar.

We don’t see the child carrying a box of water through Lagos traffic.

We see the goals.

We don’t see the sacrifices that came before them.

And then, at 15, football gave him another chance.

He heard the Nigeria U-17 team was holding trials in Lagos. He had no money for transport, so he improvised his way there.

Hundreds of boys arrived with the same dream.

Osimhen survived round after round.

Then came the final selection.

Thirty players remained.

Twenty-seven names were called.

Three were dropped.

Osimhen was one of them.

His dream, as far as he knew, was finished.

He cried on the journey home.

But something inside him refused to stay down.

When another opportunity came, he travelled to Abuja despite having almost nothing. He arrived with a backpack, two pairs of clothes and a green football kit.

Hundreds of boys were waiting.

He was eventually given 15 minutes to prove himself.

Fifteen minutes to change his life.

He ran until he was exhausted.

He scored twice.

And then his name wasn’t called.

He was already leaving when someone shouted: “The guy in green!”

The team doctor had remembered the two goals.

Those two fingers — two goals — saved Osimhen’s football career.

A year later, he was a world champion.

At the 2015 U-17 World Cup in Chile, Osimhen scored 10 goals in seven matches, won the Golden Boot and helped Nigeria win the tournament.

Suddenly, the boy who had searched for boots in a landfill was being spoken about around the world.

But even success came with responsibility.

When his first major money arrived, his thoughts were not simply about himself.

He wanted to change his family’s life.

Later, after signing for Wolfsburg, he recalled watching the numbers in his bank account change and struggling to believe what he was seeing.

Two years earlier, he had been selling bottles of water.

Now he was looking at millions.

His first instinct was to make sure his father would never have to worry about a landlord again.

That is the weight Osimhen has carried for much of his life.

He was never just playing for Victor.

He was playing for the family.

For the boy he used to be.

For the people who helped him.

For every child who looks at football and sees a possible way out.

And then life took something from him again.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, while Osimhen was in France, his father became seriously ill in Nigeria. Travel restrictions made it difficult for him to return home.

He kept calling.

Waiting.

Begging.

Hoping.

Then came the call every son fears.

His father was gone.

Osimhen was thousands of kilometres away.

The guilt, anger and grief were overwhelming.

He returned to Nigeria for the funeral wondering whether football was even worth continuing.

He had already survived poverty.

He had survived rejection.

He had survived the pressure of becoming a professional footballer.

Now he had to learn how to survive loss.

Napoli became part of that healing.

He arrived carrying emotional wounds, and under Luciano Spalletti he found a manager who believed in him and demanded more from him. Then came the 2022–23 season.

Napoli won the Scudetto for the first time in 33 years.

Osimhen was no longer simply a boy who had escaped poverty.

He had become part of Italian football history.

And perhaps that explains something about him that statistics never will.

Why does he run like that?

Why does he fight like that?

Why does he react so emotionally?

Why does football seem to mean so much more to him than simply winning?

Because football did not merely give Victor Osimhen a career.

Football gave him a way out.

Today, millions know his name.

But Osimhen still remembers being the boy with one Nike and one Puma.

He still remembers Lagos traffic.

The gutter.

The landfill.

The church.

The rejection.

The 15 minutes.

His father.

The grief.

The prayers.

And perhaps that is why his motivation has never really changed.

He has said that what he wants most is greatness — not simply for himself, but so that children who grew up like him can look at his life and believe that their circumstances do not have to determine their destination.

That is the part of Victor Osimhen’s story football fans should remember.

The next time he misses a chance, remember the human being.

The next time he loses his temper, remember the weight he has carried.

The next time he scores and celebrates like the world is ending, remember that there was once a boy who did not know whether his dream would survive another day.

We often celebrate what footballers become.

Perhaps we should sometimes stop and remember what they had to survive to get there.

Victor Osimhen came from a place where nothing was guaranteed.

Not electricity.

Not food.

Not football boots.

Not even tomorrow.

Yet he kept moving.

He kept running.

And eventually, the boy who once searched through rubbish for a pair of boots became a footballer whose name is known around the world.

From the gutter to the grandest stages of football.

That is Victor Osimhen.

Not just a striker.

Not just a superstar.

A survivor whose story became bigger than football.