Amadou Onana’s first memory of Belgium is an air mattress, he wrote in the Players’ Tribune. His mother brought him and his three-year-old sister from Senegal to Brussels on a Belgian passport inherited from his father into an apartment without furniture or heating, and for the first weeks she slept on a small sofa so the two children could keep the mattress. She wasn’t eleven.
Before all this, my grandfather lived in Dakar, Senegal. A big brown chair that no one else was allowed to sit on. A room with a terrace where the old man went to read the Koran or the newspaper and where Onana, which was unique, was always welcome. Wolof was the first language Onana ever spoke, before French. Senegal never called him up, not even at youth level. Belgium is the only country that has ever asked.
Confirmed as a starting midfielder in Seattle tonight, he will face Senegal for the first time in his career.
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The part of the story that best explains it has nothing to do with any of these countries. We are talking about his half-sister Melissa, twelve years older than her, who was already living in Belgium when Onana arrived and became, according to him, his savior. She took him to training. She brought forks and blankets from work at the hospital. Years later, when he was fifteen and struggling to find time at his first club, the coach froze him so much that one day Onana waited alone for a trip that never came, a smile from the coach that he said he would remember until the day he died. Around this time, Melissa told him she had cancer.
She was the one crying. Onana, by his own admission, immediately went into what he calls football player mode, and the words that came out of his mouth, according to his sister’s correction of his story: “We’re not bitches.” They laughed. Then they continued walking. 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 himself shaved his sister’s head, he later wrote, because she asked him to, not the other way around.
A few weeks later, there was a trial in Hoffenheim, Germany, and Melissa insisted on going with him. She could barely walk without crutches. It was minus twelve degrees. In Frankfurt they had to change trains, and Onana walked forward through the station to find the next platform, carrying her bags, and when she turned around, she saw her: bald, in a black coat, a red cap, a burgundy hat, walking along the platform on crutches. None of them said anything. They just looked at each other.
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He said that was the moment he stopped being afraid of anything on the football field. Hoffenheim signed him after this trial. Hamburg was next, then Lille, then Everton, then Aston Villa and somewhere in between, my first cap for Belgium.
He started against Morocco at the 2022 World Cup. During the anthem, he looked up into the stands and saw that the crowd in front of him consisted almost entirely of Moroccan Reds: thousands of people wearing the colors of a different flag in a stadium where there was no obvious reason to have anyone cheering for him. He continued to search anyway, and somewhere behind that red wall he found his mother and sisters, smiling and waving. He said he still remembers it and it gives him goosebumps. A year later, Kevin De Bruyne handed him the captain’s armband in the final minutes of a friendly and Onana said it was as important to him as starting the World Cup.
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None of this explains why he will wear the Belgium shirt against Senegal tonight and not the other way around. Senegal never gave him a choice.
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His grandfather, recorded for the crew years later, said this about him in a softer voice than Onana had ever heard him say, in words Samana told the Players’ Tribune: “He left home to chase his dream and he had to earn everything to get to where he is now. He’s a good boy. And I’m proud of him.”
This was recorded before tonight came into existence. After that it will still be true.