Albert Adomah was 16 when he turned up for a trial with Harrow Borough reserves.
At that age, most players with obvious talent and who’d one day go on to appear at the World Cup would already be in the system, part of a decent-sized club’s academy having been spotted by one of the ruthless talent machines that seeks out promising youngsters and piles them up, like excess stock in a warehouse.
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But Adomah, one of about 90 hopefuls that arrived that day, was not asked back, lost among the throngs trying to get into the game.
A couple of months later though, wounds suitably licked, he went back for another trial at Harrow, this time for their youth team. This time he was successful, and before too long he was playing for the reserve side who had rejected him only a short time earlier.
There was a problem though.
He had continued turning out for Old Meadonians, a team based in Chiswick, west London who play in the Amateur Combinations League and with whom he had risen from their 10th team right to the first. One weekend, a Harrow Borough reserves game clashed with an Old Meadonians cup final.
Would he choose the team he had just joined, a semi-pro outfit who could be the springboard to a bigger and more ambitious career where he still needed to make a good impression, or return to the amateur side where his journey began?
He chose the latter.
“They needed me,” he says, simply.
In many ways, that fits Adomah perfectly.
It’s not that he didn’t have drive or ambition, but even now, aged 32, a veteran and dressing room sage known by dozens of former team-mates as Uncle Albert, Adomah plays in a gloriously uncoached style, like he’s still that kid who started out in the cages and Power Leagues of west London, playing just for the fun of it. In many respects, he still approaches his football like he’s in an amateur tournament in some park, with barely a care in the world.
With that in mind, it makes perfect sense that he would pick old friends over the team that could better progress his career.
He tells another story, from a few years later, when his reputation had grown sufficiently for professional clubs to take an interest. Dagenham & Redbridge were interested in signing him, so Adomah travelled to meet with their manager, lower-leagues stalwart John Still.
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“We sat in his office and he asked me, ‘So what do you think about signing for Dagenham & Redbridge?’ At the time I was 20, so I didn’t really know a lot about them. So I just said, ‘I think I have to go home and think about this’.”
That wasn’t too well received. “He said, ‘What do you mean you have to go home and think about this? If I tell you the deal was off, what would you do?’ I said, ‘If it’s off, it’s off.’ And he couldn’t believe it. He was in shock.”
Adomah decided from that point the move wasn’t for him, prompting Still to tell David Howell, the Harrow manager who had accompanied him to the meeting, to “knock some sense into him”, as if he should be grateful for any scraps the game was prepared to throw his way.
Shortly afterwards, Adomah instead joined Barnet, where he turned professional, something he still describes as the highlight of his career. From there he moved up through the leagues pretty rapidly, also attracting the attention from Ghana, his family’s homeland, for whom he has won 19 caps and played at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.
By anyone’s standards, going from being turned down by an Isthmian League’s reserve team to appearing in the World Cup finals inside eight years, is a pretty extraordinary rise.
“I used to call it step by step,” Adomah tells The Athletic. “(I thought) hopefully one day I’ll play League Two, League One, Championship, then Premier League. I managed League Two, Championship, Premier League, national team and then the World Cup. When you get turned down, never give up. And I never gave up.”
It’s those early days that have shaped him, his personality and his approach to the game. He combined playing for Harrow with a painting and decorating apprenticeship, often working 9-5 and then rushing to get three trains back home and then go off to training. When he tells youngsters about those early days now, they don’t believe him, baffled at the idea of a career progression that wasn’t professional and solely focused on football from the outset.
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Adomah is glad of that grounding, and of the fact he didn’t start out at a shiny academy, where complacency can set in from an early age.
“When I turned professional at Barnet, I remember players coming from (bigger clubs’) academies to the lower leagues, and they weren’t good enough,” he says. “They couldn’t even make the team, and they couldn’t even understand why. Maybe they thought they’d made it already. If you can’t handle the lower league, then that means you weren’t doing something right at the top.
“I think that was a wake-up call for me as well. It made me think, ‘You know what, I need to work harder to reach the top’.”
But while he hadn’t been spotted by a bigger side as a youngster, it was pretty clear Adomah would play for one of them some day. Although it wasn’t immediately obvious to absolutely everyone…
“I remember when I went to his house to chat to his mum,” says Howell, who became a mentor to Adomah at Harrow, giving tactical feedback and home truths on lifts to and from their games. “Because she didn’t know. ‘He’s going off with his bag to play football’. She didn’t know if he was good or not. And I sat down with her and I said, ‘He’s good. He can play in the Premier League’.”
“After that, my mum was buying me football boots (and) everything that I asked for,” says Adomah.
“I think she could see that I was genuine in what I was saying,” continues Howell. “And I wasn’t just the cut-throat manager or agent trying to get her son to sign for them or to do this or to do that. I remember just every time I went to the house, they would give me bags of food and drink.”
Howell became a father figure to Adomah, in a more literal sense than even he realised. “I went to his wedding, and he introduced me to his biological father. He introduced me as his dad,” says Howell. “I was a bit chuffed by that, but I was like ‘Albert. Come on. Uou can’t say that’.”
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Adomah’s career progressed pretty rapidly.
After two years with Barnet, he jumped up to the Championship with Bristol City, winning their player of the year award in his debut season. After City’s relegation in 2013 he went to Middlesbrough, with whom he was promoted to the Premier League in 2016, but after only two games among the elite at the start of the following season, he dropped back into the second tier with Aston Villa, getting another promotion via the play-offs last year. An ill-fated spell at Nottingham Forest ended this summer, with a mutual cancellation of his contract, so that he could join his boyhood club, Queens Park Rangers.
At all of those clubs, he’s been incredibly popular, partly thanks to his personality, partly thanks to that style of play — quick and expressive, unpredictable in an era of football that’s obsessed with control.
Howell says, “When he was young, he was one of those players if you’re sitting in the stand watching the game, you move with him because he flowed and he was graceful and he was quick. He played football in the park and he brought it to the structure of ‘real’ football.
“In today’s game — where it’s all about keeping possession and passing, you know — you don’t often get players who the first thing they want to do is take somebody on one v one or get at somebody: go inside, go outside, go inside.”
He’ll be especially popular at QPR, given he’s from the area, one of theirs. “I’ve got a nine-year-old boy,” says Howell, “playing for a local side, Ruislip Rangers. All his team-mates are QPR supporters, and they don’t believe it. ‘Your dad knows Albert?!’”
“(I thought) this opportunity might not happen,” Adomah says, about the moment his agent rang this summer to tell him QPR were interested. “The team that I love, that I used to go past the stadium thinking, ‘One day, I’ll play there’. It’s just amazing. I’m living the dream for them, in a way.”
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He hasn’t hidden his fandom over the years.
In his Middlesbrough days, he caused something of a stir when he was pictured in a KFC shop wearing a QPR shirt, having bought one at the club shop before going to a match at Loftus Road. It wasn’t an attempt to sneak through a move, as a number of the more frantic Middlesbrough fans on social media feared, just a fan going to the game, then “treating his wife” (his words) to dinner afterwards.
He is at pains to stress that he’s not just there to tick something off his bucket list, though. “I’ve got a mission to get promotion (to the Premier League). And that’s the first thing I said to Les (Ferdinand, QPR’s director of football), ‘I want my third promotion with QPR, the team that I love, and I want to play more than two games in the Premier League’.”
There is something wonderfully uncynical about Adomah’s very real delight at playing for his team, particularly after the season at Forest when he was sent out on loan to Cardiff City, recalled against his wishes and ostracised to the ‘bomb squad’.
“I think the times that you don’t expect happiness are the sweetest things sometimes. I think this was like a present, in a way,” he says. “Last season was like a rollercoaster for me, and it’s like someone just said, ‘Look, this is your gift, open it’, and it was QPR. It was just an amazing feeling. It just brings joy to my heart.”
(Photo: Ian Randall/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
