Celtic and Rangers both tried to sign me but here is why my destiny lay elsewhere

Let me set the scene properly, because if I just opened with “Celtic and Rangers both wanted me” you’d assume I was exaggerating, and I promise you, dear reader, I am not the exaggerating type. I am, however, the type of person who grew up glued to Scottish football highlights on a screen thousands of miles away in Nigeria, dreaming in green and white one week and blue the next, depending on which club’s kit I’d most recently seen in a shop window or a stray Instagram post. So when I tell you that both Glasgow giants circled around signing me at various points in my footballing “career,” you’ll have to trust that the story is true in spirit even if the actual scouting reports were, let’s say, purely theoretical.

It started, as these things often do, on a dusty five-a-side pitch that had seen better decades. I was maybe eleven or twelve, all knees and elbows, the kind of player who compensated for a complete lack of positional discipline with an unshakeable belief that I was destined for greatness. Word around the local pitches was that I had “a Rangers left foot,” a phrase my coach used so often that I genuinely believed, for a solid two years, that this was an actual scouting classification used somewhere in Ibrox’s recruitment department. In my head, there was a filing cabinet in Govan with a folder marked “Left Feet, Promising, Overseas” and my name was somewhere near the top.

The Celtic interest, if we can call it that, came a little later and in a rather different form. A cousin of mine who had spent a summer in Glasgow came back insisting that I “played like a Celtic midfielder,” which at the time I took as the highest possible compliment, largely because I didn’t fully understand what it meant and was too proud to ask. Looking back, I suspect he meant I ran around a lot without much end product, which, in fairness, was an accurate scouting report even if it wasn’t intended as one. Still, once that seed was planted, I spent an embarrassing number of afternoons practising the kind of chest-out, ball-out-of-the-air control I’d seen from Celtic Park highlights, convinced I was one viral clip away from a trial.

For a while, this dual interest from Glasgow’s two biggest clubs existed entirely inside my own head, which is, I’ll admit, the most common venue for footballing interest of this kind. There was no scout, no letter, no cryptic phone call. There was just a boy on a Nigerian street pitch, absolutely certain that his future lay somewhere in the west of Scotland, torn between two clubs who would have had absolutely no idea he existed even if you’d shown them video evidence. But that certainty, misguided as it was, did something important: it turned me into an obsessive student of the Old Firm rivalry long before I ever wrote a single word about it professionally. I learned the history, the flashpoints, the managers, the derbies that had gone down in folklore, purely because I needed to know everything about the two clubs I was convinced would eventually come calling.

Destiny, as it turned out, had other plans, and it took its time revealing them. The turning point wasn’t a trial that fell through or an injury that ended a dream, because there was never a trial to begin with. The turning point was a keyboard. Somewhere around my mid-teens, I discovered that I was far better at describing football than playing it, a realisation that arrived with all the grace of a badly timed slide tackle but proved, in hindsight, to be the most useful piece of self-scouting I ever did. I started writing match reports for pitches nobody had heard of, then forum posts about matches I’d only watched on grainy streams, then eventually pieces about the very clubs I’d once imagined wearing the shirt for. The left foot that was supposedly destined for Ibrox found a new home typing out analysis of Rangers transfer business. The touch that was supposedly Celtic Park material got repurposed into breaking down Old Firm derbies from a press box that existed only in my imagination and, eventually, on my laptop screen.

There’s something quietly funny about spending your childhood convinced two rival clubs are fighting over your signature, only to grow up and realise your actual gift was narrating their rivalry rather than participating in it. But I’ve made peace with it, mostly because I think it’s turned out to be the better outcome anyway. Players get injured. Players get transferred. Players get remembered, if they’re lucky, for a handful of seasons before the next generation comes through. Writers who fall properly in love with a rivalry, who understand its rhythms and its history and its capacity to swallow entire cities whole every time these two clubs meet, get to stick around a lot longer than most careers on the pitch ever allow.

So no, there was never an actual bid from Ibrox, and there was certainly never a formal approach from Parkhead. Any scouting reports that existed were written entirely by an overconfident preteen with a wildly optimistic sense of his own left foot. But I like to think that somewhere in the multiverse, there’s a version of this story where both clubs really did come calling, where I had to choose between blue and green the way so many young players across Scotland and beyond have had to over the decades, agonising over history, family, and everything else that gets tangled up in a decision like that. In this universe, though, my destiny turned out to be sitting on the outside of that rivalry rather than inside it, watching every twist of it closely enough to write three thousand words about a referee appointment without blinking.

And honestly, given how the last few Old Firm meetings have gone, I think I got the better end of the deal. Fewer red cards in my future this way.