Alphonso Davies
Alphonso Davies – aka Phonzie – is having the time of his life after rising from a refugee camp to Champions League winner
The Canadian city of Edmonton, where Bayern Munich’s increasingly impressive roadrunner left-back Alphonso Davies spent his formative years, is not the sort of place where eagle-eyed European club scouts normally prospect for round ball excellence.
As far as the vast majority of the Edmonton populace is concerned, ice hockey is the only sport to raise the pulse. In these parts, the stick and the puck are nothing less than a religion, with fans dedicated to their beloved Edmonton Oilers, who in the 1980s won a string of Stanley Cups (the Holy Grail of the National Hockey League) and featured the inimitable skills of Wayne Gretzky, almost unanimously considered the greatest player of all time.
Growing up in Edmonton, young Alphonso – nicknamed Phonzie – was to all intents and purposes a million miles from the professional football mainstream. But what an expert navigator he has proven to be, successfully going from the “Free Footie” programme in his hometown
– an afterschool indoor league for disadvantaged inner city kids – to the heady heights of a clean sweep (Champions League, Bundesliga and DFB Cup) with Bayern last term.
Only one full season as a Bayern starter and already elevated to the rank of superstar. Not bad for a teenager who was born and raised in a refugee camp in Ghana. His rocketing market worth tells its own story: 18 months after Bayern paid Vancouver Whitecaps €11.5 million, he now would command a fee seven or eight times that amount.
It is incredible just how quick his ascent has been. At the start of last season, he was still playing for Bayern’s reserves in the German third tier. In December 2019, magazine rated him the tenth-best full-back in the country. What a difference a few months make – now he tops the charts.
Luck has been on his side too. Without the long-term injuries to Bayern centre-backs Niklas Sule and Lucas Hernandez, which resulted in the Austrian ace David Alaba sliding across from left to centre-back, Davies may still be on the sidelines. Destiny invariably needs a helping hand.
While Davies has a long way to go to emulate the gold-encrusted longevity of “Gretzky The Great One,” there is undoubtedly something very special about the teenager. Like Gretzky in his heyday, Alphonso plays the game with a twinkle in his eye. He does not perform for the pay cheques or even for the
glory. Football is total fun for him. Even in the tensest of moments, he always seems to be enjoying himself, operating with inexhaustible, almost childlike enthusiasm.
He does not solely gets his kicks from the offensive part of his duties: the explosive forward runs, mesmerising dribbling routines and sheer creative persistence. Since Bayern switched him from a flying winger to full-back in the spring of 2019, he clearly derives as much pleasure from defending. Whether covering, tackling or making a last-ditch block, he puts his heart and soul into it.
His mentality is exactly what Bayern tend to look for in a player. Immune to complacency, committed to the core and always prepared to go those extra miles for the win. Add in his dexterity on the ball and impressive physique, you have the full package. Even before he nailed a down a permanent spot in the Bayern first team, club director of sport Hasan Salihamidzic was singling him out as one to watch: “Phonzie is a machine. We like him because there’s no vanity in his game. He simply does what he has to do.”
Salihamidzic’s work as Bayern’s head of recruitment has not always met the universal approval of fans and local media. But he undeniably got his sums right when bringing in Davies, beating the likes of Manchester United, PSG and Barcelona to the tyro’s signature. As usual, Bayern did their homework, offering the most comprehensive and persuasive career plan.
Whereas successive Bayern coaches, Niko Kovac and Hansi Flick deserve much credit for successfully using him as a raiding left-back, it has to be noted that Davies was anything but inexperienced in that role. He had played there several times for Vancouver Whitecaps, frequently lined up as such for Canada and took up the same position in the 2018 MLS All-Star game against Juventus.
Canada’s English-born coach John Herdman believes he and his staff should take some of the credit for Davies’ development into a stunning left-back: “We started that process,” he recently explained on the Canadian football podcast
“Against certain types of teams who sit deep, Phonzie can provide us with great support from deep positions. He’s probably played 60 per cent of his national team games as a full-back.”
Alphonso’s attitude to the game is as simple and unvarnished as it was when he was a kid. Essentially, he is the same footballer-athlete that he always was,
Only one full season as a Bayern starter and already elevated to the rank of superstar. Not bad for a teenager who was born and raised in a refugee camp in Ghana
relishing the chance to prove himself in one-on-ones.
He loves to impose himself in such duels. It’s a primal instinct with him, an urge he showcased at all his Canadian staging posts: at school in Edmonton, on the Free Footie programme, in his early teens in the blue-and-white stripes of the Edmonton Strikers, then as a boy wonder in MLS with the Whitecaps.
From the earliest of ages, it was as clear as day he was born to be a sportsman. Tim Adams, the former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation journalist who set up Free Footie, says he was instantly bowled over by Alphonso’s rare mix of technique, agility and intelligence, that even at the tender age of 11, he radiated huge amounts of promise.
Melissa Guzzo, his gym teacher at the Mother Teresa School, noticed his aptitude for games too, as well as his upbeat bubbly personality. “Our little Alphonso was one of those kids with a permanent smile on his face, he was always dancing in the hallways,” she told
Canadian Press reporter, Colette Derworiz. “He was such a natural talent. Anything he touched – track, basketball, any sport – he was the kid.”
His prowess as an all-round sportsman has certainly played a key role in his development into a stellar footballer. His trademark stop-start dribbling manoeuvres, for example, are straight off the basketball court. The best example? His outstanding solo slalom that ended with Joshua Kimmich tapping home in Bayern’s 8-2 drubbing of Barcelona in a Champions Leaguequarter-finallastseason;an assist that was arguably the highlight of an unforgettable evening.
In the same way, his 100-metre sprinter speed gives him an edge that few can counter. Not only can he power forward, but he also has the means to swiftly recover his position – a living, breathing insurance policy for Bayern. Nick Huoseh, who prior to becoming his agent, coached him at Edmonton Strikers, says he always had the ability to burn rubber.
“He was like a gazelle,” Huoseh told Neil Davidson at Canadian Press.
“He would just take off and you can’t catch him.”
Another key figure in the Davies fairy tale was Marco Bossio, his coach at St. Nicholas Soccer Academy in Edmonton. Bossio had him under his wing for three years at St. Nick’s (from the age of 11 to 14) and successfully added to the youngster’s skill-set, with his weaker right foot and leadership qualities
coming in for particular attention. Bossio also was instrumental in Davies’ switch to the Vancouver Whitecaps academy at the age of 14, setting the recruitment ball rolling with a phone call to technical director Craig Dalrymple.
Naturally the Whitecaps would not just take Bossio at his word. They insisted on checking and doublechecking, twice inviting Alphonso to Vancouver for trials and travelling to Edmonton on several occasions to watch him in action. They even arranged for Davies to attend a Canadian Soccer Under-15 camp, where they would subject him to further scrutiny.
After jumping through every hoop put in front of him, he finally was accepted, only for his mother Victoria to voice her doubts. She thought he was too young to fly the family nest, too raw to begin a new life 720 miles away from home. Alphonso, however, managed to talk her round, promising to make her proud. As a compromise, the Whitecaps and the Davies family agreed to let him finish the school year in Edmonton and move to Vancouver in August 2015.
He would not take long to spark into life at his new place of work. Almost as soon as he arrived, rumours began to circulate that that he already had the tools to compete in MLS. Certain grizzled characters in the media thought it was all hype. Not so. By early 2016,
’Caps head coach Carl Robinson was regularly deploying him
on the wing in pre-season friendlies and he was only 15 when making his first senior start for the club, a Canadian Championship semi-final victory over Ottawa Fury.
Carl Robinson, especially appreciative of the youngster’s matchday instincts, had absolute faith in Davies, no matter the date on his birth certificate. Robinson would throw him in at the deep end without hesitation, handing him his MLS debut aged 15 years and eight months, and including him in the starting line-up for a vital CONCACAF Champions League semi-final with Mexican outfit Tigres UANL less than a year later.
His numbers in his three-and-a-half years with the Whitecaps (12 goals and 14 assists in 81 competitive first-team games) might not have been barnburner material. But he was precocious, he dazzled and he thrilled. What’s more, he turned into a one-man record-breaker, emerging as the youngest goalscorer in the history of the Whitecaps, the CONCACAF Champions League and Canadian Championship. There was simply no stopping him.
“My grandmother could have picked him out,” smiled Craig Dalrymple in an interview with in October 2018, the month he appeared in his last game for the ’Caps. “It wasn’t a case of us being great scouts. At first, we thought it was too early to relocate him from another province. His parents weren’t ready, he wasn’t ready. So we tracked him. When his parents were satisfied we could take care of him from an educational and social perspective, he made the move. Then he hit the ground running.”
Davies, the first full Canada international to win a Champions League, now finds himself cast as Canadian football’s poster boy, someone for Canuck kids to look up to and take inspiration from. Ice hockey indubitably is king in Canada and always will remain so. But suddenly soccer has a chance to dramatically extend its reach in Canada, and Phonzie has all the ingredients to be the ideal recruiting sergeant: the high-profile, the achievements, the jet-heeled playing style; his modest, cheery demeanour and last but by no means least, a most compelling of back stories.
Alphonso was born 20 years ago in a refugee camp in Buduburam in southern Ghana. His parents, father Debeah and mother Victoria, had fled there to escape the civil war raging in their native Liberia and for the first five years of his life, the sprawling United Nations compound was his world. It was the toughest of existences. With a corrugated iron shack for a home and a short supply of food and clean water, while the stench of death hung in the air.
All was to change for the family in 2005. Their application to resettle in Canada was accepted and they duly crossed the Atlantic for a better tomorrow, initially moving on a temporary basis to Windsor, Ontario, then putting down some real roots in
Edmonton, 2,000 miles to the west. With his mum and dad both working long hours of shift work, Alphonso had to step into the breach. Besides his schoolwork, he often had to take care of his younger siblings and there were plenty of other household chores to do. He had to grow up – and fast.
Talal Al Awaid, a former youth team coach of his at Edmonton Strikers, describes a young man with extraordinary levels of maturity, self-sacrifice and ambition. “He was a kid who saw the struggles his parents had to go through and who obviously had his own struggles,” Al Awaid
Davies, the first full Canada international to win a Champions League now finds himself cast as Canadian football’s poster boy
explained to Canadian Press. “As a nine and ten-year-old he had to change the nappies of a brother and sister because his parents were working. Those are true stories. It lights a different kind of fire in a person. They are driven to succeed and to make sure their family are taken care of.
“When he was 12, 13 or 14, you could have a conversation with him and not feel you were speaking to a kid. He understood that actions have consequences. He understood that in order to be successful, he had to make a commitment to certain things.”
The benefits of this early plunge into adulthood were there for all to see on his introduction to senior national team football in the summer of 2017, shortly after being granted Canadian citizenship. Just 16 when he won his first full cap as a substitute in a friendly victory over Curacao – thus becoming the youngestever player to represent the country – he took all the media razzmatazz in his stride. The youngster was all business. “You just go out there, play your game and don’t think about it too much,” he said afterwards.
At the CONCACAF Gold Cup, the following month, he pulled out all the stops, operating with verve, guile and power on either wing and scoring three times. He would leave the tournament with a clutch of goodies: the Golden
Boot, Best Young Player award, and a spot in the Team of the Tournament.
Although eligible to play for both Liberia and Ghana, he insists, he was only ever interested in representing the Maple Leaf. “Ever since I was little,
Canada has been my home,” he declared in a chat with magazine
“I’ve lived here for a long time. My parents love it, I love it. It’s the country that took me in, that made me the man I am today.”
Canada has every reason to revere Phonzie, proof that the dispossessed can find a place in the sun. In these troubled times, he is a beacon of hope.
“Ever since I was little, Canada has been my home...I love it”