When people say someone has ignited from grass to grace, the like of Taiwo Awoniyi is a swanky example. The entrenched player who now sports with the English Premier League Club Nottingham Forests is a magnificent paradigm to delineate stories of moving from the scratch to the mountaintop. Although, every other successful player has similar details to tell but this is on another whole level as it’s pictured on a Nigerian State whose interest in football has been enormous but which producing players to the limelight seem miraculous for.
Kwara State happens to be a state in the North Central part of Nigeria which houses hundreds of local football teams – almost like every other part of the world. Coming from one of multifold of teams to now play in the world’s most famous league seems like an event which happens only once in a blue moon. The journey from Brown Star, a team also described as United Academy was where Taiwo could say he had debuted as a career footballer.
In a secondary school named Sheikh Abdulkadir College, Ilorin, the 25-year-old trained local football daily with teammates who had his similar dreams and in contrast those who did not but only played the game for the fun of it at United Academy.
Born in Ilorin on the 12th of August 1997, Nigeria, Taiwo early realized that a prophet is barely recognized in his own home, he then moved to a club in Lagos, Imperial Soccer Academy. Lagos is another state in Nigeria, but in the southern part this time round; this was where the dreams of the starlet would be coming close to fulfillment as the team only would change his life for good.
Thanks to his talents and hardworking, Awoniyi quickly came back home to feature in a Coca-Cola tournament that had seen the competition’s Kwara’s delegated coaches handpick him from his team to help his Local Government participate in the famed event. Later on, his arousing individual performance in the Coca-Cola tournament gained him a presentable soccer certification and made him famous across the state.
After Coca-Cola, Awoniyi moved back to Imperial where he was later selected for the Nigerian U-17 World Cup trial in 2012 which would take place in South Africa, he would later participate in the tournament in 2013 to represent Nigeria, went on to win the tournament and scored four goals throughout the duration of the competition. Awoniyi came back to Imperial where Liverpool FC would later scout him and reached a deal with his club for a mouth-watering sum of £400,000.
From Liverpool to today’s Nottingham Forests, Taiwo has played and scored for a series of European clubs through loans and transfers. Recently, his trend surfaced the airs when he netted his former team Liverpool in a 1-0 Premier League win. He would hit the winner from close range after an initial attempt came back off a post. Also as a result, there were jubilant scenes on and off the pitch at the final whistle as his new team Forests enjoyed their best day since returning to the top flight this season after a 23-year absence.
Inside an international career which is best described as unswerving, Awoniyi netted a brace on his debut for the Nigeria U-23 team in a match against Zambia on the 12th of April 2015. He was also selected by Nigeria for their 35-man provisional squad for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Later in 2021, Gernot Rohr found him worthy to represent Nigeria at the 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifiers, making his senior international career debut in a 1–0 loss to the Central African Republic – moments later, he led the line for Nigeria in the AFCON 2021 in Cameroon. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwo_Awoniyi)
The Emmanuel Dennis Metamorphosis
Born in Yola, Nigeria on the 15th of November, 1997, a 24-year-old Nottingham Forests striker, Emmanuel Dennis, also has his boyhood academy date back to Kwara State. In this academy named Kwara Football Academy, Ilorin, and as the soccer team is famously called, KFA – this is where Emmanuel had metamorphosed into today’s established EPL player.
From 2010 to 2016, Emmanuel played, learned, trained and practiced at KFA for six years. From KFA, as described by TransferMarkt (https://www.transfermarkt.com/emmanuel-dennis/profil/spieler/448854), Dennis moved to Abuja College where he would eventually sign for an Ukrainian club Zorya Lugansk where he had 22 appearances and scored 6 goals. From Zorya Lugansk, he moved to Club Brugge for a fee around €1.40m. He played 85 games and netted 19 goals for the club before being staged in a loan agreement with the German Club FC Köln where he would later played 9 games only.
Dennis returned to Club Brugge after his loan spell and signed a deal with Watford for a fee around €4.00m in 2021. After a perfect season a Watford scoring 10 goals in 35 games, Nottingham Forests signed him for a fee around €15.00m where he now plays alongside Taiwo Awoniyi as teammates.
Dennis also has a notable career internationally; he represented Nigeria at under-23 level before being called up to the senior team. He made his debut on 10 September, 2019 in a 2–2 friendly draw to Ukraine, coming on as a substitute for Samuel Chukwueze in the 82nd minute. Dennis was part of the Nigerian squad that lost on away goals with an aggregate score-line of 1–1 to the Black Stars of Ghana in the third round of the 2022 FIFA World Cup qualifying. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Dennis)
If at all anything, the Government of each Nigerian state should fathom that producing players from the grassroots level to top European football flights is nothing but sheer fun and protracted achievements to their individual names and administrations. They should cognize that it’s also the major route to altering the level of talents produced to the National Team every single football year.
As the setbacks have been evident in the recent falls of the Super Eagles; from crashing out of AFCON 2021 shamefully in Cameroon and to not qualifying for the Qatar’s 2022 FIFA World Cup, it’s thus pertinent for the government to work with and support these grassroots and local football clubs, most especially academies, by restructuring each and every one of them, providing them with quality infrastructure and other basic needs and materials, and lastly to help lift and support their players with overseas opportunities in order to catalyze the bringing forth, digging out and discovery of the buried potentials and hidden talents in them.
