The Last Child Who Refused to Be Forgotten: Nigeria's Rising Star Janet Akekoromowei's Journey From Nigeria to Benfica

Some football stories start with a stadium. Janet Akekoromowei's starts with a big family, the last of eleven children, born in Ese-Odo, Ondo State, and raised in Lagos, the kind of ordinary beginning that could have easily gone unnoticed. Eighteen years later, she has just signed for Benfica on a deal running through 2028 with an option for two more seasons. It is the kind of ending that makes you want to go back and read the whole story again, slower this time, because every hard part in it mattered.

A Girl Who Was Never Supposed to Be the Story

Janet grew up in Lagos after being born in Ese-Odo, the last of eleven children to a retired police officer. Her mother died in 2014, when Janet was still a child trying to understand the size of that loss. Money was tight. Her father has said openly that he could not afford to send her to university, that he was just a police officer struggling to get by. There was a real, unglamorous plan for her to join the Nigerian Police Force after secondary school, a steady job, a quiet life, the kind of path so many talented girls in Nigeria are quietly funneled into because dreaming further feels like a risk no one can afford.

Then Olympic gold medallist Chioma Ajunwa, also a member of the Nigerian Police Force saw something in her and told her, plainly, to go play football instead. It is worth sitting with that for a second. One conversation. One person who looked at a teenage girl and decided her gift was too big to waste on a fallback plan. Janet listened. She enrolled at the Asisat Oshoala Academy, and everything after that started moving fast.

The Season That Announced Her

Her first professional season, with Nasarawa Amazons in the 2024/25 NWFL Premiership, should have been a quiet introduction. Instead, it was a statement. Thirteen goals in nineteen matches. Second-highest scorer in the entire league. Named Most Valuable Player in her debut season, an honour most players spend years chasing.

Along the way, a late, stoppage-time winner against holders Edo Queens sealed her side's place in that year's Super Six, she was both a threat in the air and quick enough to run in behind defenders. Once the Super Six arrived in Ikenne, she scored in each of her side's first three playoff matches, including a first-half brace against Rivers Angels, and finished the championship round with four goals in five games, the highest tally of any player in the tournament. Nasarawa Amazons finished runners-up, a single point behind champions Bayelsa Queens. It remains one of the standout individual playoff runs Nigerian women's football has produced in recent years.

That form pulled her to Bayelsa Queens for the following season, where she was trusted with the number 9 shirt, the number that tells a dressing room who the main goal-scoring threat is supposed to be.

The Injury That Almost Took It All Away

Here is the part of the story that hurts to write, because it so nearly changed everything. In February 2026, during Nigeria's U-20 World Cup qualifier against Senegal in Abeokuta, Janet went down injured inside the box. At the time, her head coach could only say the medical team was assessing her, that they were hoping she would recover in time, that nobody truly knew yet. Behind that injury was a devastating personal cost: she had reportedly been on the verge of a move to Barcelona Femeni, one of the biggest women's clubs on the planet, and the injury pulled that dream away from her at the exact moment it was closest.

Imagine being eighteen, feeling a European giant slipping through your fingers because of an injury you did not ask for, in a match you were playing for your country. It would be easy to understand if that had broken her rhythm, her confidence, her belief that the timing was ever going to be right.

It did not. She recovered. She kept working. And now, instead of Barcelona, it is Benfica, reigning Portuguese champions, stepping into their own historic era, who have handed her a contract through 2028. Sometimes the door that gets shut is not the door that was meant for you.

Nigeria Runs Through Everything She Does

Long before Benfica, Janet was already wearing Nigeria's colours at almost every level that mattered. She played for the Falconets at the 2024 FIFA U-20 Women's World Cup in Colombia, and that same year made her senior national team debut against Algeria in a friendly match while still a teenager, a rare marker of a player coaches trust beyond her age grade. She was central to Nigeria's qualification for the 2026 U-20 FIFA Women's World Cup in Poland.

Through all of it, she has stayed close to the people who shaped her. She has spoken about former Benfica player and fellow Nigerian international Christy Ucheibe as a guiding voice, someone who told her, in Janet's own words, to be humble, to go after her dreams, and to be a good person.

Why She Deserves to Be Called a Star to Watch

Janet Akekoromowei is not a hype cycle. She is a documented goal-scorer at every level she has touched: a league MVP in her debut season, a playoff top scorer, and already a capped senior international while still competing at U-20 level. Her frame gives her a physical edge few defenders in Nigeria's league were built to handle, and yet she has the speed and movement of a much smaller player. That combination, height with mobility, instinct with humility, is exactly the profile that tends to translate across leagues and continents.

But maybe the most important thing about her is not measurable in goals at all. It is the fact that she has already been tested by real loss, real financial hardship, and a real injury at the worst possible moment, and she has answered every single one of those tests by getting back up and getting better. That is not a talent. That is character. And character is usually the thing that decides who actually makes it in Europe, and who does not.

A Wish for What Comes Next

To Janet: may Lisbon be kind to you. May the Super Falcons give you a stage as big as the one you have earned, and may you give the fans everything you gave your previous clubs, everything you gave the Falconets, everything you gave a father who once worried he could not give you enough. May the shirt you wear at Benfica come to mean as much to Lisbon as your goals already mean back home. And may your exploits with the Super Falcons, in the years to come, be the next proud headline in a story that has already refused to stay small.

You were born the last of eleven children in Ese-Odo, and grew up finding your feet in Lagos. Now the whole of Nigerian football will be watching Lisbon because of you. That is not luck. That is a story you wrote yourself, and we are all hoping for an amazing ending.