Twenty six goals, a shared Turkish Golden Boot, a Turkish Cup final brace, and now a €20m Saudi offer that his club has turned away without hesitation. Paul Onuachu’s 2025-26 season at Trabzonspor has been the best of his professional life, and the club intends to keep him for what comes next.
Trabzonspor president Ertugrul Doğan has moved publicly to close down the speculation that has been building around Paul Onuachu’s future since reports emerged of Saudi Arabian interest in the Super Eagles striker. Speaking to Turkish outlet Fanatik, Doğan confirmed that a concrete offer in the region of €20m had arrived for the 32 year old, and that Trabzonspor had declined it without prolonged consideration. “An offer of close to €20 million came for Paul Onuachu, we did not accept,” Doğan said, adding that Onuachu had expressed no desire to leave a club he has grown to care about deeply.
The backdrop to the rejection is a season that has made Onuachu one of the most productive strikers in Turkish football history in a single campaign. He scored 26 goals across all competitions in 2025-26, with 22 of those arriving in the Turkish Super Lig to earn him a share of the Golden Boot alongside Istanbul Basaksehir striker Eldor Shomurodov. He also won the Super Lig Goal of the Season award and contributed two goals in Trabzonspor’s 2-1 Turkish Cup final victory over Konyaspor last month, ending the season with silverware to add to his personal accolades. A striker who produces numbers of that quality will attract interest, and Al Ahli of Saudi Arabia are reportedly leading the pursuit, tracking him as a potential replacement for Ivan Toney. Nigerian football fans following Onuachu’s club and international career can find the latest transfer updates and Bet9ja pre-match offers through Nigeria’s top Bet9ja promotion code page as the summer window unfolds.
Why Trabzonspor Hold the Cards
The club’s position is one of genuine strength. Onuachu returned to Trabzonspor permanently last summer from Southampton, having spent the 2023-24 season there on loan. The contract he signed covers him through 2028, with an additional year option in Trabzonspor’s favour. That structure means the Turkish club face no pressure to sell. There is no contract expiry approaching, no need to generate fee income to offset financial strain, and no urgency created by the player’s situation. They can, and apparently are, simply saying no.
Doğan’s public statement is also a signal to the market. By confirming the €20m offer and its rejection in an interview with one of Turkey’s most widely read football publications, the Trabzonspor president has established both a price signal and a position. Any club that wants to open serious negotiations now knows roughly where the baseline sits, and also knows that Trabzonspor’s opening stance is not to sell at all. For Al Ahli, whose interest reportedly centres on replacing Ivan Toney if the English striker elects to return to European football, the question becomes whether they are willing to significantly exceed that €20m figure and whether any amount will be sufficient to change the club’s position in the absence of the player pushing for an exit. FootballInNigeria.com.ng’s Bet9ja promotion code page has the latest pre-match offers for fans backing Super Eagles players’ clubs through the summer window.
The Player’s Own Position
Onuachu’s own stance, as reported through the Doğan interview, is that he is settled and happy at the club. That is not a trivial detail in a transfer context. A player who is actively pushing for a move creates pressure that a club must manage and sometimes concede to. A player who publicly endorses his current club removes much of the leverage a buying club might otherwise apply. Doğan’s framing of Onuachu as someone who loves Trabzonspor and has no intention of leaving suggests the Nigerian striker’s commitment to the club is genuine rather than diplomatic.
The aerial quality that makes him so attractive to clubs planning to use crosses and set pieces as primary attacking mechanisms, which is the style Al Ahli would likely deploy him in, has been central to his success in Turkey from the moment he arrived on loan in 2023. At 2.01 metres tall, he is one of the physically most imposing centre-forwards in European football, and his combination of size, technical ability, and the goalscoring instinct that produced 22 league goals this season represents a profile that does not appear regularly in any transfer market at any price.
Onuachu and the Super Eagles Tonight
While the transfer story develops in the background, Onuachu is focused on the immediate priority: Nigeria’s friendly against Portugal in Leiria this evening. He was included in Eric Chelle’s squad for the June window and is available for selection tonight before returning to Turkey at the end of the international break. His form for Trabzonspor has strengthened his Super Eagles case considerably over the past twelve months, and the Portugal match represents an opportunity to demonstrate his quality against the kind of World Cup-level opposition Nigeria will need to compete with in future qualification cycles. After the game in Leiria, all eyes return to Trabzonspor, where Doğan’s public declaration has at least temporarily drawn a line under the speculation — even if the summer window has barely begun and bigger offers than €20m have been known to change minds in football. All Onuachu and Super Eagles transfer updates through the window are available at FootballInNigeria.com.ng.
📌 Did You Know?
- Paul Onuachu stands 2.01 metres tall, making him one of the tallest active footballers in European top-flight football and the tallest outfield player to have regularly represented the Super Eagles at senior international level in recent memory.
- Onuachu holds the record for the most goals scored in a single Belgian Pro League season, netting 33 goals for KRC Genk in the 2020-21 campaign, a Belgian top-flight record that had stood for decades before he broke it during one of the most prolific individual seasons in recent European football history.
- Trabzonspor have won the Turkish Super Lig title on several occasions but have historically found it difficult to sustain championship challenges against Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe, whose financial resources and supporter bases give them structural advantages in the domestic market. Onuachu’s goals last season were central to Trabzonspor’s push to close that gap.
- Eldor Shomurodov, with whom Onuachu shared the 2025-26 Turkish Golden Boot, is a Uzbekistan international who previously played for Genoa and Roma in Serie A before joining Istanbul Basaksehir. The joint award between a Nigerian and a Uzbek striker is one of the more unusual shared Golden Boot outcomes in recent Turkish Super Lig history.
- Ivan Toney, the Al Ahli striker whose potential departure has reportedly prompted the Saudi club’s interest in Onuachu as a replacement, joined Al Ahli from Brentford in July 2024. He is an England international who was eligible to represent Nigeria through eligibility rules but chose England, making the Onuachu-as replacement narrative a Nigerian link to the vacancy created by another player who chose a different national team.
- Trabzonspor are based in Trabzon on the Black Sea coast of northeastern Turkey and are one of the country’s most passionately supported clubs outside Istanbul, with a fanbase known for exceptional home atmosphere and fierce loyalty to players who embrace the club’s culture.
- Onuachu scored twice in Trabzonspor’s 2-1 Turkish Cup final victory over Konyaspor, making him the first Nigerian player to score in a Turkish Cup final since the competition’s modern format was established, adding a domestic cup winner’s medal to what was already the most decorated season of his professional career.
