Victor Osimhen grew up next to Lagos’ largest landfill. He found his first football boots in the garbage. Now the whole of Turkey worships at his feet.
The smell of Olusosun stays in your lungs. It is thick and heavy, a scent of burning plastic and slow decay that clings to your skin long after you’ve walked away from those mountains of discarded everything. In that corner of Lagos, the horizon is not drawn by trees or towers.
It is drawn by ten thousand tons of the world’s thrown-away lives. Broken televisions, chemical runoff, old shoes, old food, old love. Africa’s largest landfill, steaming quietly under the Lagos sun, as though the earth itself is digesting something it cannot quite swallow.
Victor Osimhen stands in the middle of a roaring stadium in Istanbul today. The crowd shakes the upper tiers. His name is sung in a language he didn’t grow up speaking, by a city he had never visited before the summer he chose to go there.
If you watch him closely when the anthem dies down, and the noise fades for just a second, you can still see it. The lean hunger in his eyes. The way he grips his shirt. The boy from Olusosun never really left. He just got faster.
“Nobody should know my name,” he says, his voice completely unhurried, completely sure of itself. “The fact that you’re reading this is proof of God’s grace.”
That kind of talk could sound rehearsed coming from a footballer. It doesn’t, coming from him. There is something in the way Osimhen speaks about his life that refuses performance. He has too much material to embellish. The real story is already too large to fit inside a normal chest.
SEE ALSO | 20 Forgotten Players Who Once Played for Chelsea
The Boy from the Landfill
There were seven of them crammed into one room. A shanty town in Lagos, the kind of place the city forgets about when it is busy looking modern.
His mother died when he was two or three years old, and Osimhen is careful when he speaks about that, not because it still breaks him open, but because the memory is incomplete, the way early childhood always is. Just an impression. A feeling of being held.
“My mother died when I was 2 or 3. Too young to remember anything except her holding me. Me and my 6 siblings lived in a one-room apartment in a shanty town in Lagos. It’s called Olusosun. You may have heard of it. It’s next to the biggest landfill in Africa. People say they drop off 10,000 tons of garbage a day there. Chemical waste. Broken TVs. Anything you can imagine. That was my backyard.”
For most children, a backyard is grass and maybe a tree.
For Victor Osimhen, it was a landscape of other people’s surplus, a mile-wide inventory of everything modern life eventually discards. And when he started wanting to play football seriously, properly, with something on his feet that approximated boots, the solution was obvious to a boy who had grown up learning to find value in what others had thrown away.
“When I started playing football and I wanted boots, I’d just go out into the dump with my friends and search. ‘Hey, I found a broken Nike. Left foot! Size 8!’
An hour later… ‘Hey, I found a Puma! Right foot! Size 9!’ That was a lucky day. We had a pair of boots to share between us all.”
One Nike. One Puma. One size eight and one size nine. He laughs, telling that story now, but there is something else in the laugh too, something that never fully becomes amusement. The man never forgets what the boy had to do.
His father had been a driver. After his wife passed, he ended up washing dishes for a police kitchen, scrubbing pots to keep seven children alive. The money was never enough. That is not a complaint from Osimhen, just a statement of arithmetic.
When the landlord finally cut off the electricity, a twelve-year-old Victor sat beside a drainage gutter and cried in the dark, asking God what kind of childhood this was supposed to be.
He stopped playing. He had to work.
SEE ALSO | Arsenal Still Lack the “Grit” Required to Become Champions
Running Between Cars
The Lagos gridlock is not just traffic. It is an economy. Hawkers, vendors, runners and sellers of every kind move between the stopped vehicles like water through rock, threading themselves into windows, lifting crates, cartons, boxes onto their heads, working the five-minute gaps between green lights with professional urgency.
In a city of twenty-one million people, the traffic jam is a marketplace. And Osimhen was one of its fastest operators.
“My sisters, they sold oranges. Not at a market, but on the street. In Lagos, there’s a lot of traffic, so you can make money waiting by the side of the road and running between the cars with food. I was really fast, so I was good at selling bottled water. I’d put a box of 12 on my head and wait for someone to beep for me. Then I’d sprint over to the car before the light turned green again. I thought, ‘I’m going to be the fastest kid they’ve ever seen.’ I actually took pleasure in it. It was almost like training.”
Almost like training. That reframing is everything.
The boy carrying twelve bottles of water on his head through exhaust fumes and heat, sprinting to a car window before the light changed, was already practising something. Not deliberately, not with a coach watching, but in the deep cellular way that all great players are always practising, always refining the engine even when nobody has given them a track to run on yet.
He was a man of many trades. He won a local quiz show and walked away with the equivalent of about six euros, which he considered a fortune.
He gathered email addresses for a pastor, earning ten cents per address. He sold Bible study books door to door, a publication called Rhapsody of Realities, walking through the neighbourhood with his stack while his classmates watched from a distance.
“My classmates would pass me on the street and laugh, like, ‘Now he’s selling Bibles? What is going on?’ I told you. Hustler.”
He did soakaway work too, the dangerous and deeply unglamorous business of digging dry wells. There is always one person who stays at the surface for safety, a watchman of sorts. Osimhen was never that person.
“I was not the safety guy. I was the other guy. Hahahahah. Dirty work, bro.”
The laugh is real and big when he says it, the kind of laugh that can only come from someone who has genuinely processed the thing they’re laughing about. He is not performing resilience. He earned it, at the bottom of a hole in the ground.
15 Minutes to Change a Life
He was fifteen when he heard the national youth team was coming to town to hold trials.
He hitchhiked on the danfo, the yellow minibuses that are Lagos’s circulatory system, sitting on strangers’ laps because the fare was too much to justify a proper seat. He made it to the trials. He survived the cuts. Thirty boys remained from however many hundreds had started. Then, his name was not called.
“Dream dead. I begged the coach for an answer. He told me, ‘It’s just technical. I’m sorry.’ I remember riding the bus home on someone’s lap, and I started sobbing. The guy said, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘It’s a long story.’ ‘But why are you crying?’ ‘I’m a footballer. Or I was trying to be.'”
Two weeks later, another chance appeared. A nine-hour drive to Abuja, in a car that may have been running on optimism as much as petrol. A million boys with a million versions of the same dream. He was handed a green shirt and told he had fifteen minutes.
“Just 15 minutes to change my life. I knew that the only way to impress them was to run. So I ran until I was sweating blood. I ended up scoring 2 goals in 15 minutes.”
Victor Osimhen
Two goals. Fifteen minutes. He walked toward the car park anyway, his name still uncalled. Then a voice behind him called.
The team doctor had been watching. Two fingers held up in the air, the silent universal signal for what he had just seen. Two goals, come back. Your story is not over.
Those two fingers in the Abuja afternoon are among the most consequential gestures in the history of Nigerian football.
Without them, Osimhen probably stays in Lagos. Probably keeps hustling, probably builds something, because that is just who he is. But the specific story that followed, the one that ends with a stadium full of Turks losing their minds for him on a Tuesday night in winter, that story begins with two fingers raised in a car park.
SEE ALSO | 10 Record-Breaking Transfers That Turned Into Massive Flops
The Million-Dollar Refresh
The U-17 World Cup in Chile in 2015 was the moment the world caught up to what Olusosun already knew. Ten goals in seven games.
The Golden Boot. The World Championship. Nigeria won it, and Osimhen was the engine of everything, this long-limbed, impossibly quick, relentless kid from the Lagos dump who played like every game might be his last chance. He played like that because for most of his short life, every chance had been the last one until the next one miraculously arrived.
Wolfsburg came calling. A Bundesliga club, proper European football, proper money. And the moment the transfer fee arrived in his bank account was something he has described so vividly that it feels cinematic, except it is not cinema. It happened to a real person who two years earlier was sprinting bottled water across six lanes of Lagos traffic.
“I remember I was refreshing the bank app on my phone. Refresh. Still poor. Refresh. Still poor. Refresh… and the number changed. The number got big. It looked fake. I was going nuts. Two years before that, I was selling water bottles for 50 naira, now I saw a million. On my phone. I wiped my eyes. Am I dreaming? Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. No, it’s real.”
The first thing he did with that money, the absolute priority, was to support his father. He bought him a house. A proper house, not a room, a whole house.
And he bought him a driver, because a man who has spent years of his life working in someone else’s vehicle, washing someone else’s dishes, deserved to be driven. His father, characteristically, refused to sit in the back. He kept driving himself.
He drove with the hired driver beside him in the passenger seat, like a co-pilot with nowhere to go. There is something very beautiful about that image. A man who had survived so much refused to be waited upon but accepted the company anyway.
The Dark Side of the Ball
Football is also a business, and business is not always kind. Wolfsburg eventually gave way to Charleroi on loan, then Lille, and it was in Lille that Osimhen first understood the full weight of what he had given himself to. Because football does not pause for grief. It does not stop the machinery because a player needs to go home.
During COVID, when the world was locked, borders were closed, and the word unprecedented was used so many times it ceased to mean anything, his father fell critically ill.
Victor was in France. He spent days begging agents, begging officials, trying to find any pathway back to Nigeria. The machinery of the transfer market was simultaneously moving around him, indifferent to the fact that his father was in a hospital bed on another continent and might not make it.
He didn’t make it home in time.
“I remember I threw the phone and I just went crazy. I tore up the entire house. Smashed everything. I was out of my mind. I thought, If this is football, then what is the point? I just want to be with my family.”
There is a version of Victor Osimhen who might have quit football at that moment. Who might have decided the trade was too cruel, the demands too total, the machine too cold. That version of him does not appear to exist, but it is worth acknowledging that it could have.
The man who was so committed to family, who bought his father a driver the moment he had money, who grew up in a one-room apartment with six siblings and found that crowdedness comfortable rather than crushing, that man was separated from his father at the end, by the very industry that had finally given them both a better life.
That is a thing you don’t get over. You just carry it and keep moving.
SEE ALSO | 10 Incredible Highest Jumps In Football
A God in Naples
Napoli in 2022 was a football team with a city’s worth of unresolved longing sitting underneath it. Thirty-three years without a league title.
An entire generation of fans who had never seen their club win the thing that mattered most. And Luciano Spalletti arrived the way certain coaches do, with the absolute conviction that everything was possible, combined with the slightly unhinged dedication to proving it that makes great coaches both brilliant and difficult to be around.
Spalletti slept in his office for five months. Not metaphorically. Literally on a cot in his office, like a soldier who refused to leave the post. And in Victor Osimhen, he found the instrument his vision required.
“He believed in me deep in his soul, I swear. He thought I could be the best in the world. I would score 2 goals in a game, he’d come to me in the dressing room and go head-to-head with me. When he wanted to tell you something, he would put his head very close to yours and almost whisper… ‘Cazzo!! You could have scored 4 today. I will show you the video tomorrow.'”
Two goals and Spalletti is whispering about four. That is the kind of coaching that either destroys a player or makes him great. With Osimhen it made him great, because the ambition Spalletti was pointing at was one Osimhen already carried; it just needed someone on the outside to name it back to him.
Napoli won the Serie A title in 2023 in a way that did not feel like sport. It felt like something the city had owed for decades, like a debt finally settled.
The streets of Naples, already one of Europe’s most viscerally alive cities, became something else entirely. And in the middle of all of it was a young man from a Lagos landfill who had found his second home in a city that understood chaos and survival and beauty in roughly the same proportions he did.
“The guy didn’t speak any English. He had tears in his eyes. He said, ‘For 1,000 years they will remember you. When we are all dust, they will remember you.’ This is why I play football, for this feeling.”
Victor Osimhen — on a Naples fan after the Scudetto
Think about the mathematics of that moment. An old Neapolitan man, weeping over a phone screen showing him footage of Diego Maradona, trying to tell the kid from Olusosun that he has joined those ranks. No shared language. Only the universal grammar of a man crying from happiness, and a footballer who understood exactly what it meant, because he came from a place where that kind of collective joy is earned at enormous cost.
The Scudetto was about more than football for Napoli. It was about dignity. About refusing to be the club that always almost got there. About giving an entire city of people something to carry into the next decade.
Osimhen was the reason it happened the way it happened, with that specific authority, that specific swagger, that sense of inevitability that only the very best teams produce. His numbers were extraordinary, but numbers do not capture the feeling he gave the team. He made them believe they were chasing something they were supposed to catch.
SEE ALSO | 10 Highest-Earning African Footballers (2026 Rankings)
The King of Rams Park
The move to Galatasaray raised eyebrows across Europe. There was a general assumption among the continent’s football commentators that a player of Osimhen’s caliber, post-Napoli, post-Scudetto, post-Serie A Golden Boot, would stay in the major leagues of Western Europe. That is where players at the peak of their powers are supposed to be.
That is the logic of the market and the rankings and all the rest of it.
Osimhen was never especially interested in market logic. He has always operated on a different set of coordinates, the ones calibrated in Lagos when he was twelve years old and sitting beside a gutter in the dark, the ones that point toward feeling alive rather than feeling correct.
“When I spoke to Okan Buruk on the phone… he told me, ‘I personally, as a person and as a coach and as a father, I want you in my club.’ Before stepping on the plane to Turkey, I put everything in the hands of God.”
Istanbul received him like a homecoming, which is strange and beautiful because he had never been there before. Three thousand Galatasaray fans tracked his flight on one of those live aviation apps and drove to the airport in the middle of the night to be there when he landed.
Not a PR event. Not an organised welcome. Just supporters who loved their club, couldn’t sleep, and decided that was reason enough to go stand in an arrivals hall at two in the morning and make noise.
Okan Buruk’s Galatasaray is a serious side. The Turkish Super Lig has grown enormously in profile over the last decade, pulling in players and fees that would have been unthinkable fifteen years ago.
And Galatasaray, with their fanbase that turns the Rams Park stadium into one of the loudest, most physically intimidating environments in European club football, is the kind of club that can genuinely excite a man who grew up selling water in traffic because he loved the sprint.
The atmosphere at Rams Park on a big night is not merely loud. It is a physical phenomenon.
The red and yellow banners, the drums, the songs that never seem to start or end because they are essentially continuous, the heat that builds inside the bowl of the stadium until it feels like something is being forged there. Osimhen walked into that environment and felt immediately at home. Lagos had prepared him for it. He had been running in the noise his whole life.
His performances there have been exactly what you would expect from a man playing for people who came to the airport at midnight to say welcome.
He has given everything. He runs until he cannot run, then he finds another gear that should not exist and runs some more. Goals, assists, and the kind of defensive pressing that makes the other team’s centre-backs age faster than they should.
He is a problem the entire opposition has to solve from the first minute, and most of them cannot solve him.
What He Carries
There is a particular quality that certain athletes possess, a quality that has nothing to do with technique or pace or tactical intelligence, though Osimhen has all of those things in abundance. It is something more like irreducibility. An inability to be diminished.
You can put Victor Osimhen in a landfill or in a European final and he will be exactly the same person in both places, with the same hungers and the same purpose and the same absolute refusal to behave as though the world owes him anything.
He has had everything taken from him, and he has had everything given to him and he has worked for everything in between, and none of those phases changed the essential thing about him, which is that he always wants more.
Not more money or more fame. More feeling. More of that moment when the net moves and the city erupts and an old man who doesn’t speak your language holds up his phone with tears running down his face because you gave him something he waited thirty-three years for.
There is a conversation he returns to when journalists ask him about his journey, the one he has rehearsed not because it is scripted but because it is true and worth repeating.
He talks about the kids who are in Olusosun right now, or somewhere like it. Kids who are playing football in mismatched boots found in the garbage, carrying boxes of water on their heads in the Lagos heat, winning quiz shows for six euros and considering it a windfall.
He talks to those kids directly when he speaks publicly, and you can hear in his voice that he is not performing distance from them. He is talking to himself at twelve, sitting by that gutter, asking what kind of life this was.
“I can talk to all the kids and say, ‘Hey, I was you. A kid with one Nike and one Puma. A size 8 and a size 9.’ By the grace of God, I made it. Let my story be proof to those kids. You can start out in the gutter, and still… and still…”
He lets it trail off there. And still.
Not because he cannot finish the sentence, but because the end of it belongs to those kids, not to him. He has already written his version. Theirs are still in progress. That is exactly the right place to stop.
Victor Osimhen will be in his prime for at least another five years. There will be more goals, more titles chased and won and lost and chased again, more arrivals in more cities where he is not supposed to thrive and does anyway.
The football will continue to be extraordinary because the person producing it is extraordinary, and people who come from where he comes from and still arrive somewhere like this do not tend to ease off once they get there. The hunger does not expire.
The thing worth holding onto, the thing that sits at the centre of everything he has built, is simpler than trophies and transfer fees.
It is the image of a boy in Lagos traffic, a box of twelve water bottles balanced on his head, watching for the light to change. Running the moment he sees the opening. Reaching the car window before anyone else could get there. Pressing the 50 naira into his palm and going back to the side of the road to wait for the next one.
He was training. He just didn’t know for what yet.
SEE ALSO | 20 Greatest African Footballers of the 21st Century
This feature was compiled from extended interviews and public statements by Victor Osimhen across multiple media outlets and platforms.
