Amadou Onana’s first memory of Belgium is an inflatable 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, to an apartment with no furniture or heat, and for the first weeks she slept on a small sofa so that the two children could have a mattress to themselves. Onana was eleven years old.
Before that, there was a grandfather in Dakar, Senegal. No one else was allowed to sit on the big brown chair. A thatched room where the old man went to read the Koran or the newspaper and where Onana, uniquely, was always welcome. Wolof was the first Onana language to be spoken after French. Senegal never called him up, not even at youth level. Belgium is the only country that has ever asked.
Tonight, in Seattle, confirmed in the starting midfield, he plays against 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 either country. It is his half-sister Melissa, twelve years older, who was already living in Belgium when Onana arrived and became, in his words, his savior. She took him for 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 so completely that Onana once waited alone for a ride that never came, a coach’s smile he says he will remember until he dies. Around that time, Melissa told her she had cancer.
She was crying. Onana, by his own admission, went straight into footballer mode and what came out of his mouth according to his sister’s correction to his account was: “We are not dogs.” They laughed. Then they kept going. When she started chemotherapy, they went home to Senegal to see the family, and it was on the terrace of his grandparents’ house, on the same terrace with the chair, that Onana shaved his sister’s head himself, he later wrote, because she asked him and not the other way around.
A few weeks later, there was a trial in Hoffenheim in Germany, and Melissa insisted on traveling with him. She could not walk without crutches. The temperature was minus twelve degrees. In Frankfurt they had to change trains and Onana went through the station with the bag to find the next platform and when he looked back he saw her: bald, in a black coat, red neck warmer, burgundy hat, dragging herself to the platform on crutches. Neither said anything. They just looked at each other.
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He has said that he stopped fearing anything on the football pitch. Hoffenheim signed him after that trial. Then came Hamburg, then Lille, then Everton, then Aston Villa and somewhere in between, a first cap for Belgium.
He started against Morocco in the 2022 World Cup. He looked into the stands during the national anthem, and the crowd in front of him was almost entirely Moroccan red, with thousands of people in the stadium wearing different flag colors who had no apparent reason to hold anyone back for him. He kept looking anyway, and somewhere in that red wall he saw his mother and sisters smiling, waving. He said that he still gets chills when he remembers it. A year later, Kevin De Bruyne handed him the captain’s armband for the final minutes of a friendly, and Onana said it felt as important to him as the start of the World Cup.
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It does not explain why he will wear the Belgium shirt against Senegal tonight. Senegal never gave him a choice.
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His grandfather, recorded years later for a documentary crew, spoke of him in a voice Onana had never heard from him, Onana himself 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 kid. And I’m proud of him.”
It was recorded before Tonight existed. Even then it will be true.