Wolves midfielder Owen Otasowie’s journey to the Premier League is a different story to what you might expect.
Whilst many modern-day footballers grow up playing through clubs academy systems, working through the different age groups, Otasowie found a different path to the Premier League.
After moving to London from New York at an early age, Otasowie didn’t have an immediate passion for football.
“I didn’t move to England to play football, I just moved because I was having some family issues. I basically fell into football because that’s the culture here, in primary school we just had a kick about, but I wasn’t that involved with it.”
Ultimately it was cage football which caused Otasowie to fall in love with the beautiful game.
“In those areas it’s mainly cage football, that’s really what made me enjoy football and then I moved on to actual 11 a side, because you’re playing with your friends, but everyone takes it serious as well.”
“There was this one kid named Ibrahim, who I called every day to go to the astroturf nearby and he would basically train me because he was technically a lot better than me.”
“When I was 12 or 13, that was when I started to enjoy it and it moved on from school football to Saturday league and then Sunday league,” Otasowie told students at the University of Gloucestershire.
Otasowie then went on to move from London to Telford, opting to join Wolves instead of West Ham or Birmingham City where he also had trials.
“I wanted to move out of the area in London I was in, Peckham, it wasn’t the best if I was going to concentrate on what I needed to do.”
“The fulltime programme at Wolves just made the whole thing a lot easier, you would get picked up from school, taken to training and you basically only needed to focus on football, where at Peckham there were loads of distractions that I knew I would probably fall into.”
Otasowie hasn’t looked back since joining Wolves, progressing through the age groups until he found himself involved in Nuno’s plans.
“Transitioning from the 16s to 18s to 23s to the first team, it’s all pretty much the same thing, because the 16s would train with the 18s, 18s would train with the 23s, so when you move age group it’s not as if you’re in a different environment, so moving from the 23s to the first team, it was pretty much the same as all the other transitions.”
Speaking on Nuno, Otasowie was full of praise for his manager, who has supported him ever since they met.
“He’s supported me a lot to be honest because I’ve gotten into a lot of mischievous stuff at Wolves where I would get into a lot of trouble in my academy days and once you do one bad thing and another bad thing and another, it sticks with you throughout, but he put all of that to the side and spoke to me on a serious level and put an opportunity in front of me.”
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“He’s helped develop me as a person as well as a player, a lot of the staff have done the same as well,” he went on to add.
Otasowie has experienced a gradual introduction to the first team set up at Molineux, but slowly but surely, he’s getting more and more minutes under his belt, most recently against Manchester City.
“To be honest it was only two or four minutes,” Otasowie commented on his appearance against Man City.
“But if you look at those minutes, even that short time can be an experience.”
But it hasn’t been all post pandemic football for Otasowie, who made his debut in the Europa League, during Wolves’ 4-0 win over Besiktas, in front of a packed Molineux back in 2019.
“I made my debut in front of the fans in the Europa league, the atmosphere was crazy, so playing in front of them week in week out will be a serious experience, after my debut I don’t think I slept because of the adrenaline. It’s something to look forward to.”
Looking to the future and Otasowie isn’t looking too far ahead of himself.
“My ambition is to be the best player I can be, I don’t have an ambition to play for a certain team, but I just want to be the best player I can be.”
With the 2026 World Cup being held in Canada, Mexico and the USA, Otasowie and the rest of the US Men National Team have been keeping a close eye on it.
“We’ve spoken mainly about the 2026 World Cup, with the players we have, we can definitely go in fighting because there’s a lot of new players coming in who could definitely be a lot more established.”
There is much anticipation of good things to come for Otasowie from the Wolves fans, but for now the quietly spoken American is concentrating on cementing his place in the match day squad.
Jacob Frain Thats Sport 