The injury-prone soccer sensation has always had a tightly guarded inner circle, led by his agent, Nedal Huoseh, a family friend

Published Jun 04, 2026  •  Last updated Jun 04, 2026  •  20 minute read

Alphonso Davies has had many moments of glory, such as scoring the tying goal for Bayern Munich in a 2025 Champions League game against Celtic. Photo by ALEXANDRA BEIER/AFP via Getty Images

It was always going to be a busy week, but by Friday, May 8, it had spun beyond anything Nedal Huoseh had planned.

On Monday, May 4, the Edmonton-based soccer agent boarded a flight to Germany, arriving in Munich on Tuesday ahead of Bayern Munich’s Champions League semifinal against Paris Saint-Germain, which took place the following evening. At that game, he watched his star client, 25-year-old Alphonso Davies, injure his left hamstring just five weeks before a World Cup on home soil — a tournament with the potential to catapult the Canadian Men’s National Team captain from a soccer sensation into a nationwide household name.

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Davies’ father was also in attendance. Huoseh flew back to Canada with him the next day, landing late Thursday night only hours before Bayern publicly confirmed, at 5 a.m. Edmonton time on Friday, that the injury would require four to six weeks of recovery.

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By 9:15 Friday morning, Huoseh was already answering calls from the soccer world.

“I can’t talk long,” he said. “I don’t know if you saw the injury? I have a call in 10 minutes about it. Then I’m talking to Alphonso later today. He can’t talk either, but he’ll answer some questions over email.”

He paused.

“I’ll do my best to make sure he gives long answers,” Huoseh said. “But he’s not a very talkative guy.”

Huoseh has spent years having versions of these conversations. Since Davies was a teenager, Huoseh has helped guide nearly every major decision in his career — from contracts and sponsorships to injuries and demands attached to being Canada’s biggest soccer star.

Now, Huoseh faces perhaps the most delicate challenge of his career as an agent: managing the recovery of Canada’s biggest soccer star in the lead-up to a World Cup on home soil, where Davies was expected to be the centrepiece, while navigating the competing priorities of Canada Soccer, FC Bayern, and Davies’ long-term future.

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One question burns in the minds of Canadian soccer fans, and even those Canadians who aren’t soccer fans but who know the name Alphonso Davies: Will he be recovered enough to play when Canada opens against Bosnia and Herzegovina on June 12 in Toronto? If not, will he play in later matches, perhaps on June 18 against Qatar or June 24 against Switzerland, both in Vancouver? On May 29, Canada Soccer confirmed Davies was one of the 26 players who will represent Canada at FIFA World Cup 2026.

This is the first time Canada has co-hosted the World Cup, the international spectacle that is projected to add $2 billion to the Canadian economy while costing the country about $1.1 billion to host. Games will be held across North America in Canada, the United States and Mexico, with Toronto and Vancouver the two Canadian host cities. It’s a sign of the growing popularity of soccer in North America; according to data from The Economist, 10 per cent of Americans now consider soccer their favourite sport, narrowly edging out baseball, long considered “America’s pastime,” to become the third most popular sport south of the border, after American football and basketball.

But while thousands of Canadians wait to see whether Davies will be healthy enough to lead the national team onto the sport’s biggest stage, very little about his recovery has been discussed publicly. Davies and Huoseh have kept details surrounding the injury private — a reflection of the tightly guarded support system Davies has maintained throughout his rise. When it comes to trust, Davies does not hand it out easily. He relies on Huoseh to thoroughly vet who gets access to him.

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“For me, it’s simple, I keep my circle small,” Davies said in the promised email as he explained why he asked Huoseh, who previously operated an Edmonton construction services company, to take on the role of his agent. Huoseh first knew Davies as the talented friend of his son and coached him in Edmonton youth soccer long before the rest of the soccer world knew his name.

“I needed someone I can 100 per cent trust and my family can 100 per cent trust,” said Davies.

For years, Huoseh has occupied a role in Davies’ life that stretches well beyond a traditional agent-client relationship. Today, he’s one of the few people granted close access to the generational talent as Davies weighs questions of recovery and readiness while the countdown to the World Cup continues.

Adam Huoseh still remembers the first thing he said to Davies on the U12 soccer field in Edmonton: “Good game.”

The words came in the handshake line after a 9-2 routing of Adam’s Edmonton Strikers by Davies’s Inter squad in one of their first indoor boarded soccer games, with the future star scoring the opening goal.

“At the time, Alphonso was a little guy and right in the beginning of the game he takes the ball off the first whistle, dribbles through our whole team and scores,” Adam Huoseh said. “Me and my dad were like, ‘Who the hell is this guy? Where did this guy come from? This is unbelievable.’”

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The two didn’t become close until a couple of seasons later, when Adam landed on the same team as Davies. Their friendship deepened further when Adam’s father, Nedal Huoseh, began coaching them.

Nedal Huoseh would drive many of the players to soccer, Davies included, before routinely stopping for Slurpees or dinners at Red Robin afterward.

“I used to drive around and pick up like, four or five players,” Huoseh said. “I was like an Uber driver. By the time I would get to the football field. I’d have like five, six kids in my car.”

But with Davies, the friendship eventually stretched beyond the field. The boys spent hours riding scooters, playing video games and inventing shenanigans of their own.

“Alphonso would come up with these weird, random games,” Adam Huoseh said.

(Alphonso) was always just a good, quiet kid with that humour.

Adam Huoseh

One afternoon, while digging through the Huoseh pantry for snacks, Davies found a bag of marshmallows.

“He looks at me, starts grabbing the marshmallows and putting probably four or five in his mouth,” Adam said. Confused, Adam asked what he was doing.

“This is a challenge,” Davies replied. “You have to say chubby bunnies with all the marshmallows in your mouth.” Whoever could fit the most marshmallows while still saying the catchphrase would be crowned victor.

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“We just started saying chubby bunnies and laughing,” Adam said. “We used to do random, fun stuff like that.”

Who’s the ultimate chubby bunny champion? “I think he takes this one,” Davies said. “And to give you a strategy, I got none because most of the time I lose.”

Before long, the pair had become inseparable. “It was rare that you saw one without the other,” said Talal Alawaid, who coached alongside Nedal Huoseh at the time and now works for him at ATG Sports Management.

Soon, Davies was blending into the Huoseh family.

“He used to come to my family barbecues, with my cousins, my aunties, my uncles, my whole family knew him. He would hang out with all of us,” Adam said. “It was never an odd thing to see Alphonso at one of our family gatherings. It just meant we’d put another burger on the grill, because for a young and small guy he could eat. Then he could run again right after. He’s a machine.”

Years later, Davies still speaks warmly about those years around the Huoseh household.

“Their family means a lot to me,” he said.

Over time, the relationship between the two families became so intertwined that Davies was treated less like a teammate or friend and more like another Huoseh sibling, spending six or seven days a week at their house.

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“They were my second family,” Davies said.

The feeling was mutual. “Alphonso became like my fourth child,” Nedal Huoseh said.

For Adam, one of the most striking things about Davies’ rise is how little his personality has changed.

“He’s always been the same person. Ironically, although he’s always been a quiet individual, he had this humour to him. He was a very respectful kid. He was never disrespectful to the other teams. He was never disrespectful with the guys when we would hang out. He was always just a good, quiet kid with that humour,” Adam said.

Nedal Huoseh’s support for the players extended well beyond rides and postgame dinners. When he noticed some of the families of players on their team couldn’t afford the cost of soccer, he stepped in.

“Some of the kids, their families, didn’t have much. They couldn’t afford to pay between $600 to $800 for registration fees, plus whatever additional fees were on top of that. It’s not a lot of money for a sport, but when you’re working making $12 an hour minimum wage, and you have two or three kids, it’s not good to allocate that money to playing sports,” he said. “So, I was able to assist.”

Huoseh not only quietly covered registration fees for players in need — including Davies — but he also purchased their equipment.

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“At the beginning of every season, my dad would take us to SportChek and all together we’d purchase cleats, and he’d pay for them altogether,” Adam said.

For Adam, those shopping trips revealed something fundamental about his father.

“That’s one of the things I really look up to my dad for,” Adam said. “He always taught me to never look down on less fortunate people and to help where you can.”

Adam believes his father’s generosity is inseparable from his family’s experience with displacement and poverty.

“He gets it from my grandfather, his dad. He’s a Palestinian refugee and his family lost everything. They were very poor,” Adam said. “For my dad, I think it was always a thing of remembering where he came from.”

As unlikely as it may seem, Davies’s path to professional soccer can be traced, in part, to events that took place more than half a century before he was born. In the summer of 1948, the town of Lydda — now Lod, Israel — in the former British Mandate of Palestine, found itself caught in the violent reshaping of the Middle East.

A year earlier, conflict between the region’s Jewish and Arab inhabitants had erupted after the United Nations proposed a plan to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into two new states: Palestine and Israel. Lydda was soon caught in the crosshairs of the subsequent unrest, its predominantly Arab population at odds with the strategic importance the town held for the new Israeli state.

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When Israeli forces entered the town, most of Lydda’s Arab residents fled to refugee camps. Among those displaced was six-year-old Faisal Huoseh, who spent years moving between the West Bank and Gaza before settling in a refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, and then immigrating first to Germany and later to Canada in 1964. He settled in Edmonton in search of work in the oil industry. The Lebanese family he boarded with believed he would be a good romantic match for their cousin overseas. After a long-distance proposal, she also immigrated to Canada. Nedal Huoseh was the third of the couple’s seven children, born in 1970.

Growing up as one of the few Palestinians in Edmonton at that time, Huoseh often felt out of place.

“I experienced a lot of racism. There was a lot of discrimination. It was challenging in the ‘80s. My mom would wrap our sandwiches in Arabic pita bread and kids would look at us weird,” said Huoseh, who anglicized his name and went by Nick for years. Only recently has he begun reclaiming his Palestinian identity by using Nedal more frequently.

He watched his father repeatedly rebuild his life, and still remembers a family dinner when he was 14 years old, all seven children were crowded around the table when the doorbell rang. The sheriff came in holding a notice: the home was being repossessed. The family had two weeks to leave.

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“It was tough, but he packed up all of us kids in the station wagon, got a moving truck, and rented a new home,” Huoseh said. “We lost our home but he still managed to survive. He had that survival instinct. It takes resilience and perseverance to be able to absorb all that pressure and move forward.”

After high school, Huoseh attended the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology before starting his own business out of his home in 2003 — ASI Tech — which specializes in electrical and communication systems construction services. He grew the company to about 70 employees before stepping back from daily operations to become a soccer agent.

(The Davies family) dynamic also has that Canadian twist of being humble, staying true to your roots.

Talal Alawaid

When Huoseh met the Davies family a decade later, much of it felt familiar: six children, two hardworking parents and a family trying to build a new life in Canada.

Davies was born in Buduburam, Ghana, in 2000 after his parents fled Liberia during the country’s second civil war. Established by the United Nations in 1990, the refugee camp sat about 45 minutes east of Ghana’s capital along the Accra–Cape Coast Highway. By the time Davies was growing up there, Buduburam had evolved into a dense, bustling community of roughly 38,000 people, with supermarkets, corner stores, hair salons, schools, churches and mosques, cafés, a cinema and even a refugee-run newspaper distributed throughout the camp.

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But life there existed against a backdrop of deep instability. Around the time Davies was born, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees began scaling back assistance to refugees in West Africa in an effort to encourage Liberians to return home despite continued concerns about violence, corruption and human rights abuses in Liberia. At the same time, Buduburam itself struggled with crime and unrest, including reports of robbery, assault and sexual violence. Much of the camp was ultimately demolished in 2024.

It was in that context that Debeah and Victoria Davies moved with their four children to Canada in 2006, when Davies — then the youngest child — was five years old. They first settled in Windsor, Ont., before eventually relocating permanently to Edmonton, where they would have two more children. Davies became a Canadian citizen in 2017.

In Edmonton, the couple worked manual labour jobs to establish themselves.

“Alphonso’s mom was a cleaning lady and his dad worked at a slaughterhouse for chickens,” said Adam. “A couple times, back in the day, he gifted us chickens.”

Beyond the financial challenges, Nedal Huoseh said the family was also navigating the isolation that can come with arriving in a new country.

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“It wasn’t easy for them to get close or open up to anyone. They were new to Canada. And at that time, I hate to say it, but parents of players on the teams didn’t open up to immigrant families as much,” Nedal Huoseh said.

He said Davies’s mom was especially guarded at first.

“She holds the family together. She’s a strong woman. She doesn’t open up right away. She’s very cautious with who she’s speaking with,” he said. “I would try to break the ice with her and eventually I did and she would start calling me for help with certain things.”

Over time, those around them began to see the relationship as something deeper than just a friendship or mentorship.

“Their dynamic also has that Canadian twist of being humble, staying true to your roots. It gives a testament to how Canadian the story is in terms of Canada being a place where people can come in and have opportunity. Regardless of what background people are coming from, they’re here to help each other,” said Alawaid, Huoseh’s agency colleague and former assistant coach.

Looking back, there’s one conversation between Adam and his dad about Davies that sticks out to the 26-year-old, who now plays professional soccer in Chile for Deportes Linares after earning his law degree in the United Kingdom.

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He was only 13 years old at the time, but his dad turned to him as they were driving home from soccer with a question: “What do you think, does Alphonso have what it takes to make it pro? Everyone says he has the potential.”

Adam thought about it for a minute, then made a prediction: “I think in Alphonso’s twenties, he’ll play for FC Barcelona.”

It turns out he wasn’t that far off. In July 2018, at just 17 years old, Davies joined Germany’s FC Bayern Munich in a record-setting US$22-million transfer from the Vancouver Whitecaps. In 2025, he signed an extension through the 2029-30 season worth about $190 million.

What Adam couldn’t have come close to predicting, however, was the role his dad would play in that career progression. It started before Davies turned 14, when the Vancouver Whitecaps — one of three Canadian teams in Major League Soccer — began showing interest in having the talented youngster join their youth academy program.

At the time, the Whitecaps residency program functioned as one of the country’s clearest pathways to professional soccer. The fully funded program, which has since evolved into the Whitecaps FC Academy, recruits top teenage prospects from across the country, housing and training them while they attend school and compete against elite youth competition. For many young Canadian players, the move carries a significance somewhat comparable to leaving home for major junior hockey: a sign they have been identified as legitimate professional prospects. Davies relocated to Vancouver at 14 years old.

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“His mom initially did not want to send him,” Nedal Huoseh said. He remembers she was afraid Davies would chase a soccer career that might not pan out, and that he’d end up on her couch at 25 years old needing an allowance.

“What would you do if it was your son?” she asked. Huoseh convinced her to let him explore the opportunity.

“Nedal took Alphonso’s mom out to Vancouver and they vetted the billet families. They made sure that he was in a good place, and that the school was good and he was going to have all this stuff transferred over. Nedal helped them with all of that just as a very close family friend,” said Alawaid. Huoseh also committed to travelling to Vancouver once a month to check on Davies.

He also helped with the initial paperwork and found lawyers to review it when necessary, playing the role of agent even if there wasn’t much negotiating to be done. Between the ages of 15 and 16, Davies continued to grow and develop more of a reputation on the pitch. That’s when established agents came calling.

“I had agents offer to pay me money to convince his family to sign with them,” Huoseh said.

One agent even flew Huoseh, Davies and Adam to New York for a whirlwind experience that included dining at the city’s finest restaurants and attending a Gervonta Davis boxing fight. Huoseh made it clear he didn’t need any money but that he’d bring all proposals to the family for them to review. He estimates half a dozen proposals came through.

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“I went over to his family’s house and sat with his mom and dad. I told them Alphonso needs an agent. I said I’d helped to that point but I couldn’t take it any further because I’m not an agent and I wasn’t interested in becoming one. My company was doing really well. I didn’t need to become a football agent, that wasn’t in my head whatsoever,” Huoseh said.

It was Victoria, Davies’ mom, who challenged him.

“Habibi,” Huoseh remembers her saying, using the Arabic term of endearment. “Why don’t you be his agent? You’re a smart guy. You’re educated. We know you. You’re doing everything anyway as it is.”

The move was also obvious to Davies, who said he needed “someone who can be completely honest with you, someone who’s been there from the beginning, seen my family go through up and downs and understands your situation.” He added, “Having Nick be that person was no hesitation.”

Huoseh took time to consider their request. In the end, they convinced him.

“Not even a year and a half later, I was negotiating his contract with Bayern Munich,” he said.

The choice was not without pushback from soccer’s establishment, who didn’t think Huoseh was qualified to make the tough decisions that can define an athlete’s career, such as which club to sign with or which sponsors to work with.

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“Many of the agents had contacted me and said, ‘Oh, you’re gonna mess up this kid’s career. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re an idiot,’” Huoseh said. “I have thick skin. I don’t get my feelings hurt.”

After negotiating the recent contract renewal with FC Bayern, and securing Davies’ sponsorships leading up to the World Cup with international brands such as Red Bull, Bank of Montreal and Amazon, Huoseh feels confident time has proven his approach worked.

To be sure, the pair has faced challenges that would be difficult to navigate for even the most experienced soccer executives. The hamstring injury, just weeks before the World Cup, marks the third time since February that Davies has been sidelined with a muscle injury. He has not played for the Canadian national team since March 2025, when he tore his right ACL during the CONCACAF Nations League finals, in a third-place match against the United States. Controversy brewed in the aftermath of that injury with Bayern Munich and Huoseh both accusing Canada Soccer of mishandling the young star.

Huoseh issued a statement at the time that read, in part: “I am very disappointed. Alphonso was not 100 per cent after the Mexico game and it was planned that he was not going to start against the USA … As a captain I feel he was pressured to start the game by the coach. Alphonso is not the kind of guy to say no in those moments. He ended up playing and look what happened. Canada Soccer needs to do a better job managing these players, in my opinion. Alphonso is down and obviously really disappointed about this injury. Thankfully he is in wonderful hands with a world class group at Bayern who will take great care of him. He is expected to have the surgery within the next 24 hours.”

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Canada Soccer responded with a statement saying: “Canada Soccer’s coaches and experienced medical staff are true professionals and have always prioritized player safety and wellbeing. Anything suggesting otherwise is untrue.”

Huoseh quickly walked back his remarks on the social media platform X, taking a more conciliatory tone: “Over the past 24 hours, I spoke with Jesse Marsch (Canada’s head coach) on several occasions. I have a lot of respect for him as a coach. We had positive and productive discussions and laid down the ground work to ensure we are all aligned and working together, to continue to protect the best interests of players. Moving forward everyone involved is focused on prioritizing Phonzie’s recovery.”

In the aftermath, FC Bayern threatened legal action against Canada Soccer, with much of the drama playing out in the German tabloid Bild. Not only did FC Bayern raise alarms about clearing Davies to play, but about his treatment after the injury.

“Sending a clearly injured player with a damaged knee on a 12-hour intercontinental flight without a thorough medical assessment is, in our view, grossly negligent and a clear breach of medical duty of care,” FC Bayern chief executive Jan-Christian Dreesen was quoted as saying.

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The club’s sporting director called Canada Soccer’s actions “sloppy” and “not professional.”

The drama eventually subsided with no legal action taken. Davies returned to play for FC Bayern in December 2025, but has continued to battle injury since.

Davies was back home in Edmonton as Canada’s national team played there against Uzbekistan in a World Cup tune-up on June 1. At a press conference, he made some rare remarks about his injuries: “I love playing with my national team, I love playing with the boys. It was tough. The last year was obviously an up and down moment for me with the ACL that happened… At the end of the day I think I just have to keep my head down and keep working. I can’t let that affect me. Obviously, it was tough mentally and physically but I’m feeling good now and I’m hoping to recover as quickly as possible.”

For athletes, much rides not just on being great but on being great over time. That requires staying healthy. Some of today’s most revered athletes reach icon status largely due to their longevity. Because so much of Davies’s game is built around speed and explosiveness, the recurring muscle problems are particularly concerning and have thrown his future into doubt for some pundits.

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Amid all the controversy around who should control his recovery and medical care, for Davies, there’s no question that Huoseh is the right adviser to help him navigate the uncertainty throughout one of the most scrutinized stretches of his career. This time, they’re drawing their tight inner circle even tighter, keeping medical decisions private and out of the media for as long as possible. Huoseh is comfortable saying no to interviews or cancelling previous commitments if he believes it’s in Davies’s best interest. As the spotlight around Davies has intensified, so too has the importance of the people he allows closest to him.

“The people who know me know how I am and how my family is and those are the ones I trust 100 per cent,” Davies said.

Over time, other players have begun placing that same trust in Huoseh. His agency now works with an estimated 25 athletes at varying levels of the game. His son Adam hopes to eventually join the new family business.

“I look at the underdogs,” Huoseh said. “We work with top players but I also like looking at the ones people have overlooked.” Huoseh’s boutique approach means he can’t always compete with larger agencies to offer top youth players the same bells and whistles, so he relies on his personal touch and genuine interest in the welfare of his players to make the difference.

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“There’s a lot of kids chasing the dream,” he said. “I’ll never turn my back on anybody.”

In Davies, Huoseh saw a player worth supporting long before the rest of the soccer world caught up. Years later, with a World Cup looming and Davies now one of the biggest names in Canadian soccer history, both still view the relationship through the same lens they did at the beginning: two people learning in real time and betting on each other.

“It was new for him and new for me, but we decided to go on this journey together,” Davies said.

Main image: Alphonso Davies has had many moments of glory, such as scoring the tying goal for Bayern Munich in a 2025 Champions League game against Celtic. Alexandra Beier/AFP via Getty Images

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