{"id":10074,"date":"2024-01-03T08:02:28","date_gmt":"2024-01-03T08:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/transfer-i-almost-signed-for-chelsea-ex-super-eagles-midfielder-onazi\/"},"modified":"2024-01-03T08:02:28","modified_gmt":"2024-01-03T08:02:28","slug":"transfer-i-almost-signed-for-chelsea-ex-super-eagles-midfielder-onazi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/transfer-i-almost-signed-for-chelsea-ex-super-eagles-midfielder-onazi\/","title":{"rendered":"Transfer: I almost signed for Chelsea \u2013 Ex-Super Eagles midfielder, Onazi"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Super Eagles midfielder Ogenyi Onazi has revealed that he almost signed for Chelsea at the early stage of his professional football career.<\/p>\n<p>Onazi had a trial at Chelsea after impressing at the 2009 FIFA U17 World Cup where he helped Nigeria to a second-place finish.<\/p>\n<p>However, he failed to sign a deal with the Premier League giants because he had not attained the age of majority.<\/p>\n<p>Onazi eventually joined Serie A club Lazio in 2011 and initially featured for the youth sides of the club before he gained promotion to the first team.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I was young, I almost signed for Chelsea, but we were underage and couldn\u2019t play.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe had to wait until we were 18. There was a lot of process.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat is why my manager decided that we would go to Italy at that time. So he could start in Lazio\u2019s second team and then, when he developed, he could start in the first team,\u201d Onazi told Ajansspor.<\/p>\n<p>Transfer: I almost signed for Chelsea \u2013 Ex-Super Eagles midfielder, Onazi<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Super Eagles midfielder Ogenyi Onazi has revealed that he almost signed for Chelsea at the early stage of his professional&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10075,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[606,15,8112,160,869],"tags":[609,873,180,8113,201,870],"class_list":["post-10074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-news","category-onazi","category-sport","category-super-eagles","tag-chelsea","tag-eagles","tag-news","tag-onazi","tag-sport","tag-super"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10074\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nigerdeltanews.ng\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}