Amadou Onana’s first memory of Belgium is an inflatable mattress, he wrote in the Players’ Tribune. His mother had brought him and his three-year-old sister from Senegal to Brussels on a Belgian passport inherited through his father, to an apartment with no furniture and no heat, and for the first weeks she slept on a small couch so the two children could have the mattress to themselves. Onana was eleven.
Before any of that, in Dakar, Senegal, there was a grandfather. A big brown chair nobody else was allowed to sit in. A terrace room where the old man went to read the Quran or the newspaper, and where Onana, uniquely, was always welcome. Wolof was the first language Onana ever spoke, ahead of French. Senegal never once called him up, not even at youth level. Belgium is the only country that ever asked.
Tonight, in Seattle, confirmed in the starting midfield, he plays Senegal for the first time in his career.
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The part of the story that explains him best has nothing to do with either country. It is about his half-sister Melissa, twelve years older, who was already living in Belgium when Onana arrived and became, in his words, his saviour. She took him to training. She brought forks and blankets from her hospital job. Years later, when he was fifteen and struggling to get minutes at his first club, a coach froze him out so completely that Onana once waited alone for a ride that never came, a coach’s smile he says he’ll remember until the day he dies. It was around that time that Melissa told him she had cancer.
She was the one crying. Onana, by his own admission, went straight into what he calls Footballer Mode, and what came out of his mouth, according to his sister’s own correction of his account, was: “we ain’t bitches.” They laughed. Then they kept going. When she started chemotherapy, they went home to Senegal to see family, and it was on the terrace of his grandparents’ house, the same terrace with the chair, that Onana shaved his sister’s head himself, he later wrote, because she asked him to and not the other way around.
A few weeks later, a trial came through in Germany, at Hoffenheim, and Melissa insisted on making the trip with him. She could barely walk without crutches. It was minus twelve degrees. They had to change trains in Frankfurt, and Onana went ahead through the station to find the next platform, carrying the bags, and when he turned around he saw her: bald, in a black coat, a red neck warmer, a burgundy hat, dragging herself across the platform on crutches. Neither of them said anything. They just looked at each other.
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He has said that was the moment he stopped being afraid of anything on a football pitch. Hoffenheim signed him after that trial. Hamburg came next, then Lille, then Everton, then Aston Villa, and somewhere in between, a first cap for Belgium.
At the 2022 World Cup, he started against Morocco. During the anthem he looked up into the stands, and the crowd in front of him was almost entirely Moroccan red, thousands of people wearing a different flag’s colours in a stadium that had no obvious reason to hold anyone rooting for him. He kept looking anyway, and somewhere in that wall of red he found his mother and his sisters, smiling, waving. He has said he still gets chills remembering it. A year later, Kevin De Bruyne handed him the captain’s armband for the final minutes of a friendly, and Onana has said it felt as significant to him as that World Cup start.
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None of it explains why he’ll wear Belgium’s shirt against Senegal tonight rather than the other way round. Senegal never gave him the choice.
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His grandfather, recorded for a documentary crew years later, said this of him in a voice softer than Onana had ever heard from him, in words Onana himself recounted for the Players’ Tribune: “He left home to chase his dream, and he had to earn everything to make it to where he is now. He is a good boy. And I am proud of him.”
That was recorded before tonight existed. It will still be true after it.
