When Seydou Traore was a child in London, he worked at the NFL’s annual international games at Wembley Stadium and Tottenham Hotspur Stadium handing out stat sheets.
Some of those initial aspirations of playing American football professionally may have been sparked through his presence at those installments of the league’s international series.
The Miami Dolphins made those dreams for Traore, the Mississippi State tight end, come true with their fifth-round selection of him during the NFL draft Saturday.
He had his moment to be highlighted with the United Kingdom flag draped over his shoulders as he walked across the stage given a Dolphins hat and greeted by commissioner Roger Goodell in Pittsburgh.
With the Dolphins a popular NFL choice to play international games, Traore’s dreams could come full circle if, one season, he’s playing on the field back in one of those London venues.
“For me to flip that around on its head and now I’m on the field and people watching me, it would be amazing,” Traore said in a Monday afternoon web conference with reporters two days after getting drafted.
“It would mean a bunch. I mean, to come home, play in front of home, play in front of — not my people — but people that have someone to say, ‘This person came from London, came from England’ and just to have that backing and that support and be in the stadium.”
Traore’s intrigue in the sport was originally sparked by watching UK programming on American football across the pond. He started working the NFL’s London games and eventually ended up in NFL Academy, the league’s initiative of football training for youngsters overseas.
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“Imagine taking all the best athletes from various sports, rugby, basketball, track, wherever, and then getting them all for a trial,” Traore explained of NFL Academy. “From that trial, shrinking it again to another trial, and then taking those guys, putting them on a team, and then teaching them the game of football to give them the best shot going to D-I.”
After that, those international prospects room at the academy, receive education there and even travel to play against American high schools.
Traore felt like a natural playing American football.
“I always say that a lot of the sports I played growing up gave me kind of like natural abilities, like me being a goalkeeper in football — or soccer — kind of gave me natural hand-eye coordination. I feel like I transferred a lot of stuff,” he said.
His senior year of high school was when the world stopped during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. He didn’t have any college football scholarship offers at the time, so his journey brought him to Florida, where football was still being played.
A lone season playing 11-on-11 football at Clearwater Academy for the first time (he played 9-on-9 overseas) got him into college football.
“Coming to Clearwater, my mindset was really just to come in and dominate,” Traore said. “So, I wasn’t really thinking too much about like, ‘Oh, this is different.’ It was just, ‘Listen, I’m here for a few months. I know what the goal is to get out of here.’ I came in with a mindset to dominate.”