Celestine Babayaro

Celestine Babayaro: Backflips and Borrowed Time

At sixteen years and eighty-six days, playing for Anderlecht against Steaua București, Celestine Babayaro was sent off — becoming both the youngest player ever to appear in the UEFA Champions League and the youngest ever dismissed from it. He was still two years from being able to sign his own Chelsea contract. Two summers later he scored in an Olympic final and celebrated by turning a backflip and, as one account of it has it, sauntering like a drunken sailor towards the corner flag.

Kaduna, Jos, Brussels

Celestine Hycieth Babayaro was born on 29 August 1978 in Kaduna, Nigeria, into a footballing family — his brother Emmanuel became a goalkeeper and was part of Nigeria's 1996 Olympic gold-medal squad. He began at Plateau United in Jos, and in 1994, at fifteen, joined RSC Anderlecht in Belgium.

The Boy at Anderlecht

What happened next was extraordinary and is now largely forgotten. He did not spend years in the reserves. He won the Belgian league in his first season, took the Belgian Young Professional Footballer of the Year award in both 1994–95 and 1995–96, and won the Ebony Shoe in 1996 — all before his eighteenth birthday, and all in a foreign country he had arrived in as a child.

Atlanta

He had already won the Under-17 World Cup with Nigeria when the 1996 Olympic tournament came around. Nigeria's victory in Atlanta remains the high-water mark of African football at the Games, and Babayaro scored in the final against Argentina and was named in the tournament's all-star selection. He had made his senior international debut the previous year, at the 1995 Afro-Asian Cup of Nations against Uzbekistan.

Seven Years at Stamford Bridge

Chelsea's scout Lewis Durkin found him, and in April 1997 the club paid £2.25 million — then a club record for a teenager. He debuted in the Cup Winners' Cup, and in December 1997 suffered the injury that would set the pattern of his career, missing the rest of the season.

When fit, he was a distinctive footballer: a left-back of, as one retrospective put it, boundless running and exuberance, remembered as a sudden flash of long legs and bolting athleticism up the left side. He provided the width that let forwards such as Tore Andre Flo work inside. Over seven years he played more than two hundred matches while competing for the position with Graeme Le Saux, won the 1998 Cup Winners' Cup, the 1998 UEFA Super Cup and the 2000 FA Cup, and reached the 2002 FA Cup final. He was central to Chelsea's 1999–2000 Champions League run, though he was sent off in the quarter-final against Barcelona — a second red card in Europe's biggest competition, five years after the first.

Off the pitch, 1999 brought an indecent assault charge of which he was acquitted; he subsequently sued the Daily Star over a headline referring to a rape charge, winning an apology and a damages settlement.

Newcastle, and Two Kinds of Loss

He joined Newcastle United in January 2005 and established himself as first-choice left-back, scoring his only goal for the club in a 3–1 FA Cup win over Coventry City. In September 2006 he was banned for three matches for striking Dirk Kuyt — recorded at the time as a slap, though later footage showed a punch.

The defining Newcastle story is not that one. In February 2007, twelve hours after learning that his brother David had died of tuberculosis, Babayaro played in a 2–1 victory over Liverpool and was praised for how well he played. He was released on 10 December 2007, his contract terminated because of persistent injury.

The Galaxy Fiasco

On 21 January 2008 he signed a three-year deal with LA Galaxy, reuniting with Ruud Gullit, the manager who had brought him to Chelsea. He expected something like the arrangements made for David Beckham and found instead shabby accommodation and modest travel. On 3 March he was waived, having played forty-five minutes of a preseason friendly against FC Seoul. He trained with Portsmouth under Harry Redknapp that summer, was not offered a contract, and retired formally on 8 July 2010, aged thirty-one.

Why Celestine Is Called a Genius

The word does not fit, and the most interesting thing about Babayaro is why people reach for it anyway. What he had was precocity of an order almost nobody achieves — a Champions League footballer at sixteen, a Belgian champion at sixteen, an Olympic gold medallist and scorer in the final at seventeen — combined with a physical repertoire that made him look like he was playing a different sport. The acrobatics were not decoration; they were the visible edge of genuinely exceptional body control in a position that, in the 1990s, was still mostly filled by unathletic destroyers. He arrived as a full-back who could sprint the length of a touchline all afternoon, at a moment when English football had not yet decided that was the job.

The skill was athletic and instinctive, not technical, and the sources are candid about the gap. The same retrospective that celebrates his bolting athleticism describes, in the same breath, a shonky touch. He was quick and brave and tireless and not especially precise, and across a seven-year Chelsea career he never fully dislodged Graeme Le Saux.

The counter-case is the whole second half of the biography. A December 1997 injury cost him a season and injuries eventually terminated his Newcastle contract. He scored once for Newcastle. He was released by LA Galaxy inside seven weeks. He was sent home from the 2004 Africa Cup of Nations, alongside Yakubu and Victor Agali, on disciplinary grounds. He was retired at thirty-one and bankrupt at thirty-three. What Babayaro possessed was not genius but a startling early gift that the game, and his own body, spent fifteen years taking back.

Legacy

He played at the 1998 and 2002 World Cups, captained Nigeria's team at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and finished third at the 2004 Africa Cup of Nations. He was a first-team footballer in Europe's elite competition before he could legally drink in any country he played in, and that record — youngest to play, youngest to be sent off — has stood for three decades. He later became an agent. His son, he has said, does backflips too, having learned them from watching videos of his father in Atlanta.