When Ante Kelic was 17, he came home from school one day with a swollen foot. 

He didn’t think anything of it at first. He was a budding professional footballer, playing for the senior National Premier League side St Albans in Victoria, so was used to bruises and bumps appearing all over his body.

But this time was different. He felt incredibly unwell, and the swelling wasn’t going down.

So his parents took him to the GP to get some blood tests. Those tests led to more tests, and eventually a specialist and a biopsy. A few months later, he was diagnosed with primary sclerosing cholangitis, a degenerative liver condition that can cause cirrhosis and, if left untreated, total liver failure.

That wasn’t all. A year later, he was also diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammation of the bowel, which can result in chronic pain, fatigue, and significant weight loss.

“My whole life came to a grinding halt,” Kelic told ABC.

“All the medications and treatments that are involved to get you healthy again affect your weight, your muscles, your hormones, how active you can be. 

For the next 17 years, Kelic tried to manage both of his illnesses as best as he, his family, and his doctors could. When he felt healthy enough, he signed back up to play community football. When he didn’t, he was a manager for a boys’ state representative team.

But when he was in his early 30s, his condition worsened. He hardly had the strength to walk, let alone play or manage games anymore. Having been involved in football his whole life, his health deteriorated to the point where all he could do was watch the A-League or English Premier League on TV. 

His doctors immediately put him on the liver transplant list. But nobody knew how long he’d have to wait to find a donor.

In early 2015, almost a year after being placed on the list, he received a call. They’d found a donor. Kelic was nervous: he’d received the same call about four months earlier, and after doing all the tests and preparation, the transplant was cancelled at the last stage because the liver they’d found wasn’t viable.

“That was pretty disappointing from my perspective and my family’s perspective,” he said.

“At the time, my wife Kayla was pregnant with our first daughter, and we’d been trying for a long time to have a child.

“So it was a time of uncertainty for us, because I could feel my body deteriorating, and after that first call didn’t go ahead, I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be around.”

But the second liver they’d found was viable. 

His surgery lasted 11 hours, but it only took a couple of days for Kelic to start improving. His jaundice disappeared, he had more energy, his muscles began to regrow. Within six months, he was out on the football field again.

“I feel as good as new now,” he said. 

“With a new liver, my Crohn’s is under control, my health is at a really great stage, I’m keeping fit and active by playing soccer at the age of 44, and now I’m really excited to be able to create awareness about organ donation and share my story with the world.”

While his dreams of representing the Socceroos may be out of reach, Kelic’s ambitions to play football for Australia have been kept alive thanks to the establishment of the Transplant Football World Cup.

This week, which is DonateLife Week in Australia, 11 different men’s national teams — all made up of various transplant recipients — will compete in Italy to raise money and spread awareness about the importance of organ donation, all the while battling each other to lift a World Cup trophy.

Kelic is one of 12 players selected for Australia’s squad, most of whom already knew each other through Transplant Australia’s very own football club, which was established in 2016 by double-kidney transplant recipient Matty Hempstalk.

A football-loving employee of the organisation, Hempstalk passed away in 2022. Transplant Australia established a “Live The Dream” scholarship in his honour, and Kelic is part of the team trying to keep his memory alive through the club, and the World Cup tournament, he founded.

“Matty, at that time, had spoken to me about wanting to create a World Cup, at which point I put my hand up to help be on the committee to organise that,” Kelic said.

“The wheels were in motion for a tournament in 2020, but obviously that came to a grinding halt due to COVID. We had trials, we had the team selected, we knew the other national teams who were ready to go, but it was all cancelled — as were the exhibition games we regularly play throughout the year in Melbourne, Sydney, and Queensland to get more people involved.

“After Matty passed away, myself and another player, Matt Zoppos, who’s been by my side, basically tried to steer the ship and get this happening. 

Every player in this team, and across the tournament, has a story of struggle and survival. 

Brendan Ryland, a 37-year-old from Marrickville, had a heart replacement after being diagnosed with cardiomyopathy as a teenager. Jake Maudsley, a 28-year-old from Lake Macquarie who also wears hearing aids, had a kidney transplant after he was found to have Alport syndrome, a genetic disorder that manifests in end-stage kidney disease and hearing loss.

Nick De Bonis, 17, and 20-year-old Alec Maddocks, the two youngest players on the team, who are also both from Queensland, had lifesaving transplants to ward off biliary atresia, a degenerative liver condition similar to what Kelic experienced.

Matt Will, from Wollongong, was born with cystic fibrosis and lived most of his childhood with 25 per cent lung capacity before receiving a double-lung transplant in 2019. He was in an induced coma for 10 days and had to stay in hospital for three months as he recovered. He now works as a chef, and even represented Australia at the 2020 Culinary Olympics in Germany.

Team captain Liam Woods, from the Hunter Valley, is the only Australian player to have received a bone marrow transplant. He was diagnosed with leukaemia just over a year after the birth of his first child, while his wife Amanda was pregnant with their second. 

He had been suffering from extreme fatigue for weeks, even falling asleep at the table of a local restaurant, but had shrugged it off, thinking it was just general tiredness. But Amanda, a paramedic, told him to get a blood test.

Like Kelic, those tests turned into more tests, before an alarming note from a doctor that had red writing all over it told him that he had cancer. He didn’t realise the seriousness of it until he phoned his mum and his wife, both of whom screamed and burst into tears.

“I’d just started a new job, we were renovating the house to get ready for our second child, we were planning a trip to New Zealand … and then it was like, ‘OK, what’s going to happen now?'” Woods said.

“The first round of chemotherapy, which started in November, really, really affected me. Not just physically, but emotionally and mentally as well.

“It was incredibly challenging being stuck in a hospital room, trapped in four white walls, because people couldn’t come in and out if they were unwell and other things. I couldn’t really see my daughter either, because we didn’t know if she was carrying a cold that could affect me.

“After the first round of chemo, they knew I needed to have a transplant. My stem cells weren’t in a good position to try and recover. So they needed to do a search: my brothers and sister all tested, but they were all matches for each other, not for me. So they had to look worldwide.

“We went to Westmead Hospital, and they explained that if I didn’t have a transplant, I was a 26 per cent chance of surviving. During the transplant process, it was a 50-50 that it would take or that it wouldn’t. If I got it done, I had about a 56 per cent chance of surviving, even if things went well.”

While the doctors searched for a donor, Wood waited. And waited. And waited.

Outside of his family, one of the few joys he had throughout this limbo period was football. He’d been involved since he was a kid, playing or coaching or refereeing: anything to stay close to the sport he loved.

During treatments, or on nights where he couldn’t sleep, he’d be awake watching the Premier League. Amanda brought him a PlayStation so he could play FIFA on the hospital television. He even snuck a ball into his room to kick around when he had the energy.

Finally, in 2015, after months of searching, a bone marrow donor from the United States was found.

“It was life-changing,” Woods said. “It was a second chance of life, especially given that 26 per cent diagnosis and the possibility that I may not be here much longer.

“I think that’s what spurred on the next two chemo treatments. What we had to do, too, was get the third chemo treatment done so that I could be at the birth of [second child] Frankie, as well.

“So we had to plan things: just keep the mind ticking over and looking forward. We wanted to extend our house, put a pool in the backyard, providing for our kids … just in case I wasn’t here if the transplant didn’t go well.”

But it did. Nine and a half years on, Woods’ health is “the best it’s ever been.” Once he felt well enough, he signed up for the Transplant Australia Football Club, where he met Kelic and all the other players who he now considers close friends. 

He was one of 60 people who expressed interest in trialling for the Australian team, 30 of whom attended a development camp in Sydney before being selected by Central Coast Mariners FC Academy coach Camryn Milne.

“This club is something that’s part of me now,” he said. 

“Anyone that’s had an organ or tissue donation or stem cell transplant can be part of the club.

“For those of us who love, breathe and dream football, we just wanted to have a club that we could regularly play games throughout the year, because some of the guys can’t play normal football due to what they’ve been through; their body doesn’t allow them.

“But this gives us an opportunity to meet up and play together, play against different clubs or teams, and gives us another avenue of getting back into the game we love after our transplants.”

An offshoot of the World Transplant Games Federation, the World Cup has slightly different rules to regular football in order to protect the players. 

Halves are 20 minutes long, compared to the usual 45, and slide tackling is strictly not allowed. Any dangerous play is presented with a straight red card, instead of the regular yellow warnings, while players are allowed to wear braces or guards to protect the more delicate parts of their bodies. They play on a smaller-sized field, with a maximum of seven players allowed on at any one time.

There are two groups in this year’s tournament, who will play each other in a round-robin format before moving to the semifinals and final. Australia has been placed in Group B alongside host Italy, Spain, Northern Ireland and Chile. 

Loading…

Ironically, despite all the precautions, the players get no rest days — they play one game every day, though they do get unlimited rolling substitutions — but, if the World Cup attracts more funding and support, they hope to build out the format and invite more nations to compete in future. They also, one day, want to set up a women’s program.

The players won’t mind some sore muscles and tired legs, though. They’ve been through far, far worse than that.

“It displays the human spirit at its best,” Kelic said.

“A lot of us, at one stage, were thinking about our own mortality. From my perspective, trying to be a father and not knowing if I was going to be around, so to receive the second chance and gift of life through organ donation from a stranger is nothing short of amazing.

“Lots of my family and friends weren’t on the organ donation register previously, but knowing what has happened with me and now seeing the outcome and how healthy I am now, they’ve all signed up. I love getting messages from them showing their organ donation card, or to say they’ve registered.

“Hopefully our journey will inspire people and educate people to consider signing up, or to at least understand the process.”

For Woods, who was chosen by his peers to captain the team in Italy, this tournament isn’t really about trying to lift the trophy. 

He has a much more important goal: spreading the word about organ donation, and showing fellow transplant recipients that there is a future for them in football, and in life, too.

“We had a team meeting the other night and we were talking about the ‘why’,” he said.

“Why are we doing this? A lot of it was to give thanks for our second chance, and to prove to others that, regardless of what we’ve been through, we can still get out there, we can still be active, we can go and play for Australia and put on the green-and-gold and live the dreams we had when we were kids.

“It’s giving us an opportunity to go out there and give thanks to our donors, thanks to our families, and thanks to everyone who has helped us get here.

“Nine years ago, I would have never imaged to be in this position. I was laying in a hospital bed, I’d lost 20 kilos in the transplant process. So to be here now, the healthiest I’ve been, about to be an ambassador for not only Australian football but the transplant community of Australia, is one of the proudest moments of my life.”

The Transplant Football World Cup will be live-streamed through links provided on the Transplant Australia Football Club Facebook page.