Socceroos star Awer Mabil: from refugee camp to dreams of World Cup glory
Born in a refugee camp in Kenya, he found a new home in Adelaide – and fame as an elite soccer player. Now Awer Mabil has become the face of hope.
Awer Mabil had kicked that penalty goal a thousand times as a kid. He dreamt he might one day score it for his country. But what country? On the patch of rocky dirt that passed as a soccer pitch in Kenya’s sprawling Kakuma refugee camp, Mabil would practise penalty kicks every day. He would ignore the blood on his bare feet that had been cut-up by playing on the sharp rocks. He didn’t worry that his own “ball” was made with plastic bags wrapped in socks.
“It was all about soccer, every day, it was how he passed the time, it was his life,” says older brother Awer Bul. He would watch as his younger brother ran in and smashed the plastic “ball” past the goalkeeper and into the imaginary net. GOOOAAAL! At that moment, Mabil was always transported to a better place. He could pretend for a brief moment that he and his family were not destined to a hardscrabble life with no future. He could pretend he was not one of the 90,000 displaced war refugees from South Sudan doomed to live in Kakuma – the Swahili word for “nowhere”.
Twenty years later, Mabil is lining up for another penalty. It’s 4-all in the penalty shootout between Australia and the heavily favoured Peru in Qatar in June. The prize for the winner is a place in soccer’s World Cup.
Mabil walks onto the pitch to take the penalty for the Socceroos. There are no rocks underfoot today. His feet are not bleeding. He wears real football boots and places a real soccer ball on the penalty spot, adjusts it and takes a deep breath. In his head every childhood memory is erased except the act of kicking that goal. All he is saying to himself is, “I’m gonna put it away.” He takes a short run and smashes the ball past the Peruvian keeper, who has dived the other way. His goal puts the Socceroos 5-4 up.
Moments later, the Socceroos’ goalkeeper Andrew Redmayne produces his famous save to put Australia into the World Cup. As his teammates embrace, Awer falls to his knees and buries his face in the turf. His whole body is heaving as he sobs. For everything. For his mother, who saved his family from war-torn Sudan, for his sister and best friend Bor, killed in a car crash three years earlier, and for the sheer absurdity of his unfathomable journey from a mud hut in Kakuma to the soccer World Cup. On the other side of the world, Australians are screaming and dancing in front of their TVs. Anthony Albanese tweets: “World Cup here we come.”
As Mabil leaves the pitch, arm in arm with his teammates, he dedicates his penalty goal to his adopted home. “It was my way to say thank you to Australia,” he says. “For giving my family a second chance at life, for giving that kid born in a refugee camp a chance to dream.”
Ian Smith was on the board of the A-League soccer club Adelaide United when he first noticed the kid. “It was a decade or so ago, he was a really junior player and he would get the bus from the northern suburbs for training,” he recalls. Smith spoke to young Mabil, then only 16 years of age, and was intrigued: “He had an incredibly absorbing background, his history was just remarkable.”
Yet things were about to happen in Mabil’s world that would soon change the lives of the two brothers and save the lives of countless others. Mabil was just 10 years old in 2006 when he and his mother and sister were accepted into Australia as humanitarian refugees, settling in Adelaide. Then, in 2012, Mabil’s older half-brother Awer Bul also made his way to Adelaide as a refugee, reuniting the family. Soon after, Bul asked Mabil if he wanted to go back to Kenya to see the Kakuma camp where he was born. “I thought it would be nice for him to revisit the place where he was born and maybe we both catch some of the memories,” says Bul. “We didn’t want to come empty-handed, so we took 20 football shirts with us.”
So in 2014, when Mabil was just 18, the two brothers went back to Kakuma. But neither was prepared for the trauma that it triggered in them. “It was very emotional for me going back to the camp for the first time,’’ says Mabil. “When I left, I was only a boy, but coming back as a young man I saw it from a completely different perspective compared to when I was a carefree kid. I saw how it was such a difficult place and a difficult situation and a difficult environment.” The camp had more than doubled in size since Mabil lived there. “It made a very big impact on him,” recalls Bul. “In fact, I think it changed his life and pushed him to make a mark on whatever he did next.”
Mabil recalls being overwhelmed at that time by “strong memories” of his childhood, both joyous and tragic. His mother, Agot, had escaped the civil war in South Sudan and fled to Kakuma in 1994, a year before Mabil was born. He says he never knew his father. “We lived in a mud hut the size of a one-bedroom house and we cooked outside,” he says. The hut had a dirt floor and no power. The camp was lawless and dangerous. Health care was almost non-existent. The family was almost entirely reliant on food aid from international charities and lived mostly on just one meal a day. “There was a UN program so every second week we got a kilo of rice and we had to make that last until next time,” he says.
“The camp was a place where you sit idle and wait for the services to sustain your life like food, water or medicine,” Bul says. “You had to be creative to pass the time and Mabil did that by running around playing football all day.”
When he wasn’t playing soccer in the dirt fields, Mabil would often walk an hour to the nearest person with a television and watch soccer on TV. He could never imagine that he might be one of those players himself. “When I watched soccer on TV in the camp it didn’t look like reality,” he says. “It looked like a fantasy, as if the players were characters that were not real. I never saw that it might be possible to be one of those characters.”
Mabil says his mother always talked about going back to live in South Sudan when it was safe to do so but when John Garang, the revolutionary leader who helped found South Sudan was killed in 2005, the family realised it was no longer safe to return. “When he died it was like, ‘Oh shit, we are in trouble now, what do we do?” It was clear we could not go back to South Sudan because it was not safe. But one of my uncles lived in Australia so he helped us apply for a humanitarian visa, which finally came through,” he says.
“It was my way to say thank you to Australia. For giving my family a second chance at life, for giving that kid born in a refugee camp a chance to dream”
Through the eyes of young Mabil, his new life in Adelaide was a shock. He couldn’t speak the language and he couldn’t work out why houses were fenced off and why neighbours did not mingle with each other each night like they did in the camp. “It was difficult for them because they came with nothing and they knew no one except me,” says Mabil’s uncle Peter Kuereng, who came to Adelaide from Kakuma in 2002 and who sponsored Mabil’s family to come to Australia.
But for Mabil, the wondrous thing about Adelaide was that it had real soccer fields and real soccer balls. “In the camp my feet would always get cut up because of the rocks,” he says. “But when I got my first pair of boots [in Adelaide] and went to training and saw all those balls there, I was like, ‘Oh this is so easy.’ I didn’t have to worry about the simple things like equipment. It was amazing.”
From the moment he started playing for his local club in Adelaide he was a precocious talent who would dribble the ball around numerous opponents as if they weren’t there. But while Mabil loved soccer, he was more intent on hanging out with his new Australian friends. He didn’t see football as a pathway to anything. “I was hanging out with my friend, not taking football very seriously and I was doing boys’ stuff, getting in trouble,” he says. “The turning point for me was when I was about 14 or 15 and Tony Vidmar called my mum and invited me for a trial.”
Vidmar, a former Socceroos player and currently an assistant coach of the Socceroos, was then a youth coach with Adelaide United and saw the potential in the young refugee. Vidmar persuaded him to take the game more seriously. “At that time that really was the turning point in my life,” says Mabil. He took his chance and he flourished, making his debut for the A-League at just 17 years of age.
The second turning point in Mabil’s life was that visit to Kakuma with his brother Bul in 2014. The brothers returned to Adelaide with a fire in the belly to do something to help the refugees of Kakuma. They sought out Ian Smith, one of the country’s most influential lobbyists and networkers who is married to former Democrats leader Natasha Stott Despoja. “Mabil came back from the camp with a real desire to represent those who needed representation,” says Smith. “They sat down with me and they collectively came up with the idea of starting a charity to help the refugees of Kakuma – which was called Barefoot to Boots, in recognition of Mabil’s own journey.”
Smith got then foreign minister Julie Bishop on board and she launched the new charity in 2015 when Mabil was 20 years old. From that time until the Covid pandemic shut down travel, Mabil juggled his burgeoning football career with multiple visits to Kakuma. “I think I went back eight or nine times,” he says. “I talked to all my teammates and they gave me their spare boots and I took them over there to give to the kids who were playing soccer with bare feet,” he says.
Guided by Smith, Bul and Mabil, Barefoot to Boots has since donated more than 2000kg of football boots and uniforms to the refugees of Kakuma. It has also expanded to provide educational, medical and sanitary goods including incubators, ultrasounds, laptops and books. Put simply, it has saved many lives.
Smith says Mabil’s difficult childhood and his dedication to improving the lives of other refugees has made him grow up faster than most 27-year-olds. “In many respects he is beyond his years,” says Smith. “I often think that is the case with people who have been displaced. There is a sense of forced maturity in a refugee that we just don’t understand. You give a refugee an opportunity and they will take it. And that is Awer Mabil.”
It is late at night and Mabil is sitting in his new apartment near Cadiz in southern Spain, wearing a white sweatshirt and a broad grin. He is laughing about who his Danish girlfriend, who lives with him in Spain, will barrack for when Australia plays Denmark in the World Cup as part of a group that includes Tunisia and reigning world champion France. “Maybe she is hoping for a draw,” he says. “But if I score in a penalty shootout I will make sure I celebrate like crazy in front of her dad.” Mabil moved to Spain earlier this year when he joined the La Liga club Cadiz as a winger. When I speak to him, he has just come back from a day of sightseeing in Seville, exploring the churches and the old town with his girlfriend. He is desperately trying to learn Spanish because he says only a handful of his new teammates speak English.
In person Mabil is friendly and smiles easily but he also thinks more carefully about his words than most sports stars do. Maybe that’s because he is so much more than just a footballer. Our long conversation roams from football to politics to refugees, war, tragedy, philosophy and even the meaning of life. It’s clear he has thought a lot about each.
The move to Cadiz is the most high-profile yet in Mabil’s rising career, which began in 2015 when, at the age of just 19, he was recruited by Danish club FC Midtjylland after playing 47 matches in the A-League with Adelaide United. “Mabil is playing at the most senior level of any Australian footballer in the world at the moment,” says Smith.
But it hasn’t always been an easy journey for Mabil, who has suffered at times from homesickness and has played at various times for leagues in Turkey and Portugal. Initially he found it hard to break into his Danish team. Everything about football in Europe was a lot more professional than in Australia. “In Europe you can’t have any weaknesses and I need time to develop some parts of my game, like being better defensively,” he says.
It wasn’t until 2018 that he realised he could match it with the best players on the continent and he became a key player in the club’s senior team at a time when the club was dominating the Danish league. “A number of Australian players have gone to Europe and returned within a couple of years because it hasn’t all gone their way,” says Smith. “Mabil has had his ups and downs at clubs but his perseverance is beyond belief and it’s remarkable what he has achieved.”
“I would like to visit South Sudan. I want to be someone who can make change”
That same year, in October 2018, he was called up to make his debut with Australia’s Socceroos against Kuwait in Kuwait. Incredibly, another debutant for the national team that day was fellow South Sudanese refugee and close friend Thomas Deng. “We lived in the same suburb, we went to the same school and then we made our debuts together,” says Mabil.
Mabil came on as a substitute in the second half. “It was always my dream to play for the Socceroos and when I ran onto that field for the first time it was a surreal feeling that I can’t describe,” he says.
And then, in the 88th minute, Mabil scored his maiden goal to help the team to a 4-0 win. “To make my debut for Australia and then to score a goal. Yes, it was like a dream. I dedicated that goal to my mother. Because she made me who I am. She made so many sacrifices for my family, she overcame every obstacle to raise us on her own. She is my general, because we were raised without a father but she never made us feel like we were missing something. She just worked twice as hard to make sure we were OK.”
But just months later, in January 2019, Mabil’s world came crashing down. Hours before playing for the Socceroos in the Asian Cup in the United Arab Emirates, his 19-year-old sister Bor Mabil was killed in a car crash in Adelaide. Bor was a passenger in an Audi sedan that was involved in a street race with another car when the driver of the car she was in – who was drunk and on drugs – lost control and slammed into a fence. The four other people in the car, including the driver who was later jailed for dangerous driving, received only minor injuries. But Bor died at the scene.
Mabil did not hear about the accident until after the game. “I was in my hotel room when there was a knock on my door,” recalls Mabil. It was the Socceroos coach Graham Arnold. “He told me then and it just broke my heart,” says Mabil. “She was my best friend. She was like the glue for our family. I would call her every day and we would talk every single day,” he says as his voice trails away in sorrow. “She called me her little brother even though I was older.”
After hearing the news Mabil had to call his mother, who was visiting her elderly mother in Nairobi, to tell her that her daughter was dead. “It was the hardest thing I have ever had to do,” he says. “It has not been easy, it is still not easy. It shows how life can be so very tough. For me and my family things were just starting to roll, after all the hard work things were looking up and we were starting to enjoy our life. I was so sad.”
Mabil’s grief for his sister was such that some wondered if he might give up on soccer. “When you have a big loss like that, some people would not make it through,” says his brother Bul. “But Mabil is a great guy, a very brave guy. He has a strong heart and he has grown in how he deals with things.” Adds Smith: “He had an incredible bond with his sister and I think that [her loss] has driven him.”
Mabil says the loss of his sister has made him look at life more broadly than soccer. “Life has shocked me in a way that I probably was not ready for,” he says. “I’ve started to look at it from a bigger picture. I have started to ask myself, ‘What am I if I am not a football player?” Football is just 15 years of life and life is much bigger, so I’m starting to develop my own interests outside of the game.” He says he is thinking of new ways he can make an impact to help refugees beyond Barefoot to Boots. “I am trying to figure out the best way to do that. I would like to visit South Sudan and I want to be someone who can try to make change and help people.” His uncle Peter adds: “He has a big heart. What he wants to do is give back to his community and to his country.”
When Mabil was 15 he sat down and wrote the five things he wanted to achieve in soccer. “I remember writing my dreams,” he says. “One was to play in Europe, two was to play in the Champion’s League, three was to score in the Champion’s League, four was to play in one of the top five leagues in the world and five was to play for Australia in the World Cup.” When he plays for Australia in this coming World Cup, he will have achieved them all. But now he wants to add a few more goals to this childhood list of dreams. Now he wants to help the Socceroos upset their more fancied opponents in the World Cup. “We like it when it’s tough,” he says. “We are going to go out there with the support of our country behind us and try to push the world’s best.
“You have to be grateful for every moment of life and try to enjoy it. And you know what I would enjoy?” he says with a grin. “Seeing the headline ‘Socceroos beat France’. ”
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