The new African footballer of the year, Ademola Lookman, grew up and attended a school in Peckham where he got straight As and was a model student.
Lookman, 27, attended St Thomas the Apostle in Nunhead, before signing to Charlton Athletic aged seventeen, kick-starting a dramatic career of both soaring heights and crushing lows.
After receiving the prize on Monday, December 16, Lookman has a place in history once held by legends like Samuel Eto’o, George Weah, Abedi Pele and Didier Drogba.
However, the road to the top has been bumpy, with a tough moment coming while he was on a season-long loan at Fulham from RB Leipzig.
In November 2020, during injury time of a televised Premier League fixture against West Ham at the London Stadium, Fulham were tailing by a goal.
The visitors were awarded a penalty but Lookman’s weak Panenka chip looped straight into the arms of Lukasz Fabianski.
“I couldn’t even describe the devastation,” Lookman told the Guardian a few months later.
Speaking in Yoruba, and wearing a traditional agbada robe, Lookman said: “I want to say to the young children and people watching this: don’t let your failures weigh you down so they break your wings. But turn your pain into your power and continue to fly.”
Lookman, born in 1997, was raised by his mother in Peckham, attending St Thomas the Apostle, while his father remained in Nigeria.
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In an interview with Southwark News in 2017, one of his former teachers, Ali Young, described the former St Thomas the Apostle pupil as a “model student”.
“He was a standout footballer in his year group and a standout sportsman. He was a good all-rounder – he was a top performer in a number of sports but obviously, football was his best,” Young said.
Ademola achieved four A*’s and five A’s in his GCSEs.
Young added: “I remember him being in school until 6pm every night revising for his GCSEs. It didn’t really matter what he was doing, he would be one hundred per cent dedicated to it. He was deputy head boy, too. He was a model student – both sports-wise and academically.
“He is a really humble, articulate and intelligent young man. We’re all incredibly proud of him.”
Lookman left Charlton for Everton aged nineteen in an £11million deal in 2017 but struggled to secure a regular starting place.
He went on loan and then made a permanent move to RB Leipzig in the German Bundesliga.
It again looked like he wouldn’t fulfill the talent he showed in South London when further loans at Fulham and Leicester City followed.
But a £10 million move to Serie A Atalanta was the making of him.
He became the first player since 1975 to score a hat-trick in a major European final when he tore through Bayer Leverkusen – who hadn’t lost a game in any competition all season – to help the
Nerazzurri to a 3-0 win in the Europa League final in 2023-24.
Lookman represented England up to under-21 level but qualifies for Nigeria through his parents and made his senior international debut in 2022.
He helped them into the final of the Africa Cup of Nations last year, where they lost 2-1 to Ivory Coast.
Lookman finished fourteenth in this year’s Ballon d’Or before being crowned Africa’s best this week.
