Osama Vinladen

Vinladen made his professional debut for Unión Comercio on 30 May 2018 against Universidad San Martín when he entered the game as a substitute in the 87th minute. The match ended in a 0–0 draw.^[1]

Vinladen was part of the Peru U-15 squad that participated in the 2017 South American U-15 Championship.^[2]

Vinladen is named after Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al-Qaeda – in Spanish, the letters ⟨v⟩ and ⟨b⟩ represent the same phoneme and they both sound [b] or [β̞], depending on the surrounding phonemes (see Spanish phonology). His brother is named Sadam Huseín after the dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and his father planned to name the third sibling George Bush after U.S. president George W. Bush if it had been a boy.^[3] When Vinladen had a son of his own, his father suggested George Bush, but he chose a conventional name instead.^[3]

Vinladen told the Peruvian press: "My friends used to make fun of me and at the beginning it bothered me. But you learn to live with it and I feel normal now." He always wondered why his parents gave him such a controversial name but never received an explanation from them: "I asked my dad the reason, but he always avoids talking about it."^[4] In a radio interview in 2020, he made the following connection: "When Osama bin Laden knocked down the Twin Towers, the name was in the news and I was born (a year later) on October 7, 2002." He added that his father liked the name. He also stated that he had often thought about changing his name but had not done so because he had come to accept it. To avoid criticism, only his first name "Osama" appears on his jersey.^[5]

During another interview, a journalist asked him if it was dishonourable to bear the name of someone as bad as bin Laden or not, to which he responded: "I do not believe my name to be problematic," citing Peruvian politician Hitler Guesclin Alba Sánchez, who won a mayoral election over the ironically-named Vladimir Lenin Rodríguez Valverde in 2018 and made headlines in the process, and Brazilian footballer Marx Lenin as other figures with similarly controversial names.^[3]