The NFL veteran opens up to PEOPLE about his unlikely football journey and how he’s created a foundation to help foster kids

NEED TO KNOW

• Efe Obada is launching the Efe Obada Foundation to support foster care youth in South London
• Obada, the first NFL player from a European football league, overcame a difficult childhood in foster care
• The foundation, backed by the NFL, aims to empower youth through sports and create a community hub

Efe Obada can only laugh in disbelief when he realizes where he is now.

“It’s insane,” the 34-year-old NFL defensive lineman says to himself as he watches a group of kids from a Brixton foster care system play flag football at a South London park near one of the many homes where he once grew up.

Obada lived in nearly a dozen foster homes in the same neighborhood before he turned 18, when he finally felt free of a flawed system he now hopes to help fix with the money and stature he earned playing a sport that had never once crossed his mind at that age.

“There was no one there showing me the way when I was younger or making it seem like anything was possible, and I wish I had that,” Obada tells PEOPLE exclusively. “I want to be that for these kids.”

He adds: “It’s possible. Because look at me: I did it.”

That’s the message the first player to ever join the NFL straight from a European football league wants to share as he announces the launch of the Efe Obada Foundation on Wednesday, Aug. 12. Not the other one that might steal headlines, with Obada officially announcing he’s retiring from professional football.

“It’s a celebration,” the 10-year NFL veteran tells PEOPLE. “It’s more of welcoming this new exciting chapter of my life.”

Obada’s next chapter is perhaps the one his life has always been building towards. 

The NFL calls Obada’s story “remarkable,” but that barely scratches the surface. There are 1,696 active players in the league at any given time, yet just 37 players have ever come through the International Player Pathway Program and signed with a team. Obada was the first — despite having not touched a football until he was 22 years old.

He was working a cash-in-hand job at a South London factory in mid-2014 when a friend suggested he come to an open tryout for the London Warriors football team. Obada made the cut and soon scored an unofficial tryout with the Dallas Cowboys on the recommendation of a coach while the NFL squad was in London.

Obada received a call months later from the Cowboys, who offered him a three-year, $1.3 million contract.

Efe’s Pathway

Before that call, Obada’s life seemed to be perpetually on the run.

Born in Nigeria, his mother moved him and his younger sister to the Netherlands, where she struggled to make ends meet. She then paid a stranger to take the children to London on the promise she’d look after them until their mother followed. Obada has shared what happened next: the woman took the money and abandoned them on the street, leaving them to bounce from foster home to foster home until he was old enough to live on his own and care for his sister.

“I was placed in homes where you know families would treat us as domestic slaves,” Obada says. “There was physical abuse and all sorts of things I felt wasn’t conducive in making this place my home or a safe place for me to be a child, or to feel valued, or loved, or whatever it may be that you’d want for you for your children.”

Obada thought the hurdles might stop after he got out of the system. But without citizenship and documentation, he struggled to find work and began falling into what he only describes as “trouble” with gangs in an effort to provide for him and his sister.

Obada has said without the NFL, he might have been dead.

But then came football and everything it had to offer: an outlet for years of pent-up anger and frustration, teammates to help fill the void of family, and most importantly, a financial pathway out of a life that seemed to so often set him up for failure.

“I don’t identify as an NFL player,” Obada says after a decade in the league. “I’m just a guy who [happened] to play in the NFL. But this is my legacy. This is my life’s purpose. This is how I feel like I can really make a real impact and real change in this world — something that’s going to outlive me.”

Efe’s Next Chapter

Obada’s last NFL snap came in 2023 when he was carted off the field during a game with the Washington Commanders after a hit left him with multiple fractures in his leg. He always knew the joke around the locker room, that the NFL stood for “Not For Long.”  But in the years since, Obada struggled to cope with accepting his time was done.

“There was definitely just this void of, you know, what was left after making that decision and trying to figure out who I am outside of football and what I want to do and what my new purpose is,” says Obada, who also suited up for the Carolina Panthers and Buffalo Bills during his time in the league. “I had to look inwards and figure out what makes me happy. And this [foundation] is what brought that fire and that spark and that light back into my life.”

The Efe Obada Foundation was spawned with help from his wife — his high school sweetheart, whose name he prefers to keep private — and backed by the NFL, which says its long-term goal is for the foundation to “establish a permanent, dedicated community hub in South London.”

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The Efe Obada Foundation will exist “to empower and transform the lives of young people with experience in the foster care system, aged 11 and 25,” according to the league, and use sports to “create a safe, inclusive environment in which young people feel valued, heard, and empowered to own their futures – providing access to opportunities that Efe himself never had.”

One of the ways the foundation will aim to reach kids is by organizing flag football games with direct funding from the NFL — like the one Obada recently watched at the park in his old neighborhood.

Obada says he’s “overjoyed” by what this all means: that football might lead another kid down the unexpected path it took him.

“This is a game that changed my life,” Obada says. “And the same way someone opened the door for me and gave me an opportunity, I want to do the same for them. And then maybe one day they’ll do the same for someone else.”

If you suspect child abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child or 1-800-422-4453, or go to www.childhelp.org. All calls are toll-free and confidential. The hotline is available 24/7 in more than 170 languages.

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