Mohammed Kudus has built a career on patience and exacting standards. The 25-year-old arrived at Tottenham Hotspur this summer as a \u00a355 million recruit after two years at West Ham United, but his progression began long before England. Raised in Nima, north of Accra, he found playing space on sand and credits that environment with sharpening his control. “I think on the grass pitch, receiving a ball, you automatically expect how the ball should come and bounce,” he says. “But on a sand pitch it can move anywhere. So you have to react quicker to controlling the ball … looking at it in a positive way, I think it helps in a way, if you can find your way through the sand with the bumpy ball.” <\/p>\n
His mother, Mariam, supported the family as a street vendor and enforced strict rules at home. She “played both roles of being a mum and a dad at the same time” and left no doubt that schoolwork came first: “if you don\u2019t pass your school exams or your test, then you\u2019re not going to play football.” Right to Dream recruited him at 12 and Mas-Ud Didi Dramani recalled a determined teenager training through a broken thumb. FC Nordsj\u00e6lland signed him on his 18th birthday and he established himself by the end of his debut campaign, then followed that with 11 goals from 22 league starts and a first senior Ghana call-up in November 2019, where he scored. “When you play for a country,” he says, “that stays with you forever.”<\/p>\n
Kudus moved to Ajax in 2020. Less than 10 minutes into his Champions League debut against Liverpool he tore his meniscus, a setback that began a run of injuries that cost him 50 games across two seasons. “All those setbacks and injuries, you get to learn about your body, study yourself, so I put my effort into that,” he recalls. He hired a personal trainer, focused on recovery and returned to post a career-best 18 goals in 2022\u201323, including a Champions League equaliser at Anfield in September. Asked why he crossed the London divide this summer, he was direct and succinct: “My gut feeling.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At 25, Kudus moved to Tottenham after West Ham, shaped by Nima, education, sand pitches and recovery<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3477,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[969,187,438],"tags":[1081,1047,1019],"class_list":["post-3478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-premier-league","category-tottenham-hotspur","category-west-ham-united","tag-adaptation","tag-champions-league","tag-creative-players"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}