Now a star at Everton, Amadou Onana’s time before that was filled with ups and downs, especially when he was trying to find himself a club early on in Belgium.
The midfielder bounced from club to club, as tends to be the case at a young age, and one of his pit stops was Zulte Waregem, even if nothing went right there.
DH in Belgium have a very long piece about the Everton player’s early years where they speak to various coaches, including Mike Adem, who was in charge of the scouting for the Belgian side and spotted him despite initially travelling to look at another boy.
Saying Onana stood out in the game he watched, he ‘immediately invited’ the youngster to join the club, which was a two hour train away from his home.
Adem said: “At the beginning, it was hard for him to pay the train pass, but he did it.”
With him moving schools out of the question and no space to put him up in the academy, there was little other choice than for him to spend four hours on the train, two hours there and two hours back, to be able to attend training.
Adem added: “He was often late for training. We couldn’t blame him, but we weren’t going to make an exception for him. You’re late, you don’t play. Our academy aims to create footballers but also men. He was frustrated with the situation and sometimes didn’t come to training.”
That’s when the Everton player’s family started having issues with Waregem, and were turned down when they made a ‘modest’ request to help him out.
Then director of the academy, Gijs Debuyck explained: “The family of the player wanted us to intervene in the payment of his train pass. It wasn’t possible financially. We had our own rules and don’t offer financial advantage until they get to a certain stage. If we had given him what he was asking for, we would have opened the door for others.”
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and the decision was made to not return and find himself a new club, which is when the opportunity of a trial with Hoffenheim came about, where he finally signed.
That was in 2017, and he stayed there until 2020, when he moved to Hamburger SV for a year before signing for Lille and then Everton for €35m.
In the end, it’s fair to say that Zulte Waregem did help create the player and man he is today, just not in the way they will have wanted, missing out on a clear talent due to their reluctance to dig a tiny bit into their pocket to make his life easier.
