Olayinka, whose name Siegl could not think of and called him Olijanka, or From 100 dollars in Albania to a mile
11 hours ago, 12/01/2023 23:13
Pavel Procházka
photo: Instagram account @olayinka_peter
Czech League
THURSDAY OFSAJD PAVLA WALK
The calm of the winter break was disturbed by the news that the 27-year-old Nigerian striker and occasional captain of Slavia Prague, Peter Olayinka, will leave without a replacement for the Serbian CZ Belgrade after the start of the spring season, when his contract at Eden expires. Now the Slavists are negotiating with representatives of Crvená zvezda about the fact that the best scorer of the Red and Whites in European Cups (13 goals) would transfer now, so that they can get at least 20 million crowns for him. At the same time, transfermarkt.de sets his current price at 6 million euros, i.e. about 150 million crowns. In the meantime, the player flew with Slavia to a training session in the Portuguese Algarve on Tuesday.
It is not customary for an African player to become a captain in the Czech league, Peter Olayink managed to do it in Slavia, at least sometimes. Maybe the tape was also so that he would receive it properly in all the matches. For a while, experts couldn’t figure out his name, literally.
For example, Horst Siegl called him Olijanka again. But the Nigerian performed so interestingly in Slavistic services that even Siegl finally learned to pronounce his last name correctly.
Tverdík: “Traitor? never, Slavic icon”
A huge discussion immediately broke out around Olayinka’s sudden departure, some Slavia fans could not breathe and criticized the club management because of it.
“In several months of dialogue, we were looking for ways to extend the contract. We didn’t agree. The player had significantly better offers than Slavia could give,” Slavist leader Jaroslav Tvrdík answered them immediately on Twitter.
Other Slavist supporters also objected to the fact that Peter Olayinka had himself photographed in the CZ Belgrade jersey half a year before the end of his contract with Slavia and that the Serbian club is supported by the Russian oil giant Gazprom, whose advertisement is also on the jersey.
“With this, Olayinka should end it on the stand and not play the spring at all. Favoring a pro-Russian bastard in today’s wartime is a bitter pill to swallow…shameful.” wrote, for example, one enraged Slavia fan on Twitter.
“I am ashamed of what you are capable of writing about one of the legends. For me, Olayinka is the captain of Slavia. Icon. He has the right to choose a new club according to his will. We can only applaud and thank you. It is one of the symbols of the current Slavic era. He gave the club positive energy and the best years of his football career. He deserves respect and reverence. Portrait on the wall of the stadium. We can all wish him the best of luck at his new club. I love you Oli,” Jaroslav Tvrdík told all the critics once again.
“I Was Cold in Albania”
I first registered Peter Olayinka seven years ago in Juliska, where in 2016 he was a guest in the jersey of the first league Dukla Prague.
Between 2016 and 2017, he appeared in a total of 29 matches and scored six goals in the yellow-red jersey. However, he didn’t particularly impress me at the time, he didn’t look like a star, he often seemed impetuous and sometimes even came on the pitch as a substitute. But the truth – he was only a little over twenty years old then.
After all, his path to football fame was quite a bumpy one. At the age of fifteen, he tried out at the FC Lion 36 club in the Nigerian capital, Lagos. And when he was seventeen years old, he decided rather adventurously to go to Europe, specifically Albania, to play football.
There he signed a semi-professional contract with KF Bylis Ballsh.
“Leaving Nigeria and going to Albania was a difficult decision. I played there with teenagers. It was extremely cold there, I didn’t even have a jacket with me. I only took a hundred dollars a month for a whole year (about 2400 crowns – note Red.). So I had free food and accommodation there, but it was a very difficult period. I wanted to earn good money, but at the same time I had nothing to do in Nigeria football-wise,” he recalled more than three years ago in an interview for lidovky.cz Petr Olajinka.
For comparison, last year the server ruik.cz named her as the third best-earning footballer in the Czech league with a salary of over a million crowns a month!
Escape to Northern Cyprus
“After the unsuccessful escape to Turkey (Olayinka had the worst physical results of the whole team there due to illness) he was offered a loan at Yenicami Agdelen, where he first had to play fifteen friendly matches in order to sign a new contract.” lidovky.cz described Olayinka’s anabasis.
After returning to Albania, Peter won two championship titles in Skenderbeu Korce’s jersey, which, by the way, was also coached by Czech coach Stanislav Levý five years earlier.
From Belgium to the Czech Republic, back to Belgium and again to the Czech Republic
Then we already know the story.
In December 2015, Belgian Gent bought the Nigerian striker. In Belgium, Peter signed a three and a half year contract. However, due to a knee injury, he did not play much for Gent, which is why he ended up on loan in Dukla in July 2016. Then he returned to Belgium, where he was a guest at Zulte Waregem for a change. And in July 2018, he was bought by Slavia for 83 million crowns, making him the most expensive signing in their history at the time. Only Romanian representative Nicolae Stanciu (100 million crowns) surpassed Olayink’s record in Eden.
“Oli will still do a lot for Slavia,” let himself be heard in 2019 as a Slavist coach Jindřich Trpišovský. And he was right.
Thanks to his successful engagement in Eden, Peter Olayinka also got a glimpse into the Nigerian national team (four starts so far – the first on October 13, 2019 against Brazil in Singapore /1:1/, even if only for the last minute).
During his slavistic career, he also managed to get married – in March 2021, he married Nigerian model and actress Yetunde Barnabas. Their photos in African wedding costumes attracted a lot of attention on social networks in the Czech Republic as well.
“Gentlemen, which of you has it?”
“Peter Olayinka was paradoxically helped by the departure of Jarda Zmrhal. He gets chances. We just need him to calm down when making decisions in key situations. The invitation to the national team is a demonstration of his quality,” Jindřich Trpišovský evaluated the then twenty-four-year-old Olayink more than three years ago on the lidiovka.cz server.
Olayinka was not always able to calm down, his form fluctuated, sometimes he was excellent, sometimes ripe for a switch, but from July 2018 to November 2022 he had very good times at Eden over four and a half years. During that time, he won three titles and two domestic cups with Slavia. With it, he experienced the basic group of the Champions League, the quarter-finals of the European and European Conference Leagues, and wore the captain’s armband.
Whatever I think about his rather abrupt departure, we must say the words of a former Czech prime minister, a great slavist by the way, Jiří Paroubek: “Gentlemen, which of you has it?”
And even if Olayinka is now moving to Belgrade, Jaroslav Tvrdík is right: Peter probably deserves that portrait on the main stand in Eden. Few African footballers have made their mark in the history of the Czech club and the Czech league in this way. Most of them have only an episodic, sometimes even shrill, role here.