Oumar Niasse's forgotten Norwegian spell

A trial that turned into a loan

In February 2012, a young Niasse arrived in Norway for a trial with Brann after his breakthrough season with US Ouakam, where he had just helped the Dakar club win the Senegal Premier League title. The trial went well enough that Brann signed him on a six-month loan, hoping the winger who had scored 21 goals in Senegal's second tier a few years earlier might bring something similar to the Tippeligaen.

It did not happen. Niasse's time at Brann was undone by poor form and injuries, and rather than establishing himself in Norwegian football, he found himself limited to just three league appearances. There is no record of him scoring in that stretch, and by the end of the loan period he was on his way back to Senegal rather than staying on for a permanent deal.

Why it barely registers

Compared to what came next, it is easy to see why the Brann spell has been swallowed up by the rest of his story. Within eighteen months of leaving Norway, Niasse had signed for Akhisar Belediyespor in Turkey and scored on his Süper Lig debut, eventually finishing that first season with 15 goals. From there came a €5.5 million move to Lokomotiv Moscow, where he scored the equaliser in a Russian Cup final win, and then the £13.5 million transfer to Everton that made him one of the most talked-about attackers in the Premier League, for better and worse, given the rocky relationship with Ronald Koeman and the loan spells that followed at Hull City, Cardiff City and later Championship and lower-league clubs.

Against a Hull City loan that produced Premier League goals against Liverpool and a brace off the bench versus Swansea, or a Russian Cup final winner, three quiet matches in Bergen simply don't compete for space in the story people tell about him.

A false start, not a failure

What the Norway spell shows is that Niasse's path to the top flight in England was not a straight line. He had to recover from a loan that gave him almost nothing, just three appearances in half a season, before rebuilding his reputation in Turkey and Russia. It is easy to view a player's rise as inevitable once it happens, but Niasse's six months at Brann are a reminder that his breakthrough was delayed, interrupted, and nearly derailed before it properly began.

He never played for Brann's first team beyond those three matches, and the loan simply expired without any suggestion of an extension or permanent deal. It's the kind of entry that shows up as a single line in a Wikipedia career section and is easily skipped over, yet it was a real, difficult chapter for a player who would go on to earn a multi-million-pound move to the Premier League only a few years later.