If Okoye wasn’t a lion, he wouldn’t be sitting here right now, in Udine, in his apartment above the rooftops of the city that is literally at his feet. The barber who cut his hair has just left. So Okoye is now a lion without a mane. He extends his left hand as a greeting, the right is injured, a torn ligament in the joint, black cuff, several weeks off. But this will pass – what’s more important is that he’s here at all. And he wouldn’t be that if everything had gone normally.
The story that Okoye, 25, has to tell on this December evening in Udine is a classic rags-to-riches story. It’s about his childhood in Düsseldorf, the drug dealers who stood next to the football field, and the thin line between the wrong path and the right path. It’s also about Kai Havertz, with whom he played together in the Leverkusen youth team – and about a broken kneecap.
The story has several twists and turns, and when Okoye tells it now, goosebumps form on his thigh, above the kneecap that he broke about ten years ago while rushing from rooftop to rooftop. Although he doesn’t want to reveal what he was running away from back then, Okoye says it happened while he was on the run. A fall, no football for eight months, rehab – and then he was written off. For four years he didn’t play, not a single friendly game, nothing. The broken kneecap could have broken him, his will, his confidence – but he came back.
“It was normal for us to go down the wrong path,” says Okoye
Until his injury, Okoye was considered an exceptional talent. When Kai Havertz was voted best player at youth tournaments, he was often the best goalkeeper. A Havertz with gloves, if you will, but then, after the injury, he was basically finished. The career was basically over before it even started. And that’s also why this story is a good one: because it shouldn’t actually exist. Because Okoye wouldn’t be sitting on a white leather sofa in his living room in Udine if things had gone the way they did with one or two of his childhood friends.
“It was normal for us to go down the wrong path,” says Okoye. A primary school, drug dealers and a kiosk where prostitutes bought cigarettes – all within a hundred meter radius. He grew up there, in an area where it’s easy to slip: temptations everywhere, weed on every street corner, filling up your backpack at the supermarket, letting something go at the kiosk, later the people he grew up with robbed a gas station.
When Okoye talks about it today, there is a certain distance. It was a long time ago, he found his way. But he doesn’t just recite the escapades of his childhood like he used to do in school. They are a part of him; he still has the images from back then in his mind today. Okoye doesn’t deny where he comes from; after all, it’s what made him who he is today. To a fighter.
The license plate of his car also reveals the city in which his roots lie: D, Düsseldorf. When Okoye drove to the stadium the day after the conversation, he heard German rap. The songs are about what he used to do: making shit up. That’s how he puts it. His teammates are about to leave, an away game in Milan, Coppa Italia, but Okoye is staying in Udine. For lunch we have lentil soup, then he trains whatever he can with his injured hand.
When he was 17, Fortuna brought him back from Leverkusen, even though he hadn’t played for four years.
The thin line he was walking on back then could easily have cost Okoye his career. He was expelled from school twice, but the older he got and the more football demanded of him, the less often he went over the top. When he was 17, Fortuna was kind to him and brought him, the Düsseldorf boy, back from Leverkusen, even though he hadn’t played for four years.
The club, Okoye says today, simply saw something in him. And that’s why everything happened very quickly when he was back in Düsseldorf: appearances in the junior Bundesliga and in the regional league team, training with the professionals and finally the invitation to the Nigerian national team because Lutz Pfannenstiel, Fortuna’s sports director at the time, had a good connection to national coach Gernot Rohr.
But when Pfannenstiel resigned and Uwe Klein took over, Düsseldorf suddenly withdrew its contract offer, says Okoye. The dream of guarding Fortuna’s Bundesliga team was gone – but Sparta Rotterdam came forward, a club from the same city where his father had arrived decades earlier on a container ship from Nigeria.
From his apartment on the 21st floor, above the roofs of Rotterdam, you could see the harbor, says Okoye. He still remembers the moment when his father visited him and looked down from the balcony to where he had reached Europe after three weeks in a pitch-dark container. His father had come from the bottom up, literally and figuratively. This is worth more to Okoye than any parade or award. “My father always tells me: Don’t do it for me,” says Okoye, “but I’ll do it for him.”
His father in a container, his father cleaning toilets: these images that he has in his head are what drives him. These pictures also made him a lion. And now, in 2024, a glass trophy sits on his living room shelf. Twenty centimeters high, with the inscription on it: “Miglior Giocatore del mese di Febbraio”, best player of the month for February, a prize that his club awards itself. So is he, Okoye, a winner now?
When Udine’s goalkeeper talks about the here and now, about Italian football, about the fact that he is now stopping shots from Lukaku, Leao and Lookman, he is amazed. He still can’t quite believe that he’s now playing in all the big stadiums, in one of the best leagues in the world. He had to take several detours to get here. In Rotterdam, in his two years in the Eredivisie, he performed so well that FC Watford took notice of him: Premier League, the best league in the world, a dream. “This is the biggest thing there is,” says Okoye. But when he came to London for the new season, Watford were second division and he was only second choice. In the race for promotion, the club preferred to rely on a more experienced goalkeeper, says Okoye. Because Watford’s club owner is also Udine’s club owner, he was given his next chance in Serie A.
“That’s not normal,” says Okoye, “I went from a second division team in England to Serie A without playing. That doesn’t normally work.” But thanks to the connections between the two clubs, it worked. And now, in 2024, he is number one here, in Serie A. He loves the Bundesliga, says Okoye. If he doesn’t play on Saturdays, he also watches the conference here in Udine in the afternoon, but he still sees his future in Italy. This is where he arrived, this is where he made a name for himself.
In the summer he negotiated with Inter Milan. He was supposed to come as a backup goalkeeper for Yann Sommer and be built up for the future, but then Inter chose Josep Martínez over him. A setback, again, but it continues. Maduka Okoye fights, he is a lion.
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