Two-time Super Bowl champion and NFL ambassador Osi Umenyiora confirmed that there will be a NFL camp in Lagos, Nigeria this year, to scout talent for the NFL Academy and IPP Programme.
Umenyiora, who is the NFL’s lead ambassador in Africa and has fronted camps for the NFL in Ghana and Kenya, stopped short of naming a date.
However, he confirmed that Lagos was next on the horizon, having previously scouted there for his own Uprise program.
“Yes, absolutely – we do [plan to host a camp in Africa this year]. I think Lagos, Nigeria, is the next place that we’re going to have a camp. Don’t know the date yet, but I can say with some degree of certainty that we’re going to have a camp in Nigeria,” Umenyiora told ESPN.
Umenyiora, who won Super Bowl XLII and XLVI with the New York Giants before finishing his playing career with the Atlanta Falcons, co-founded The Uprise with fellow Nigerian and former basketball star Ejike Ugboaja in 2020.
He has since been scouting talent for the NFL, although the league officially began holding camps in Africa two years later as many of the top Uprise talents attended the NFL Africa Touchdown camp in Ghana, hosted at the prestigious Right to Dream Academy.
It is little surprise that he plans to focus on Lagos next, as the two African International Player Pathway (IPP) players who he singled out as being ready for NFL action – Chukwuebuka Godrick (Kansas City Chiefs) and David Ebuka Agoha (Las Vegas Raiders) were both training there when Umenyiora recruited them.
