What would inspire you to sell up your old life and move thousands of miles away to a small country you’d only previously spent two weeks in?
For Maikeli Lomu, it was a Facebook post.
He was taking a break from working on his laptop when he spotted the advert. It was an appeal from the Tongan Football Association, asking for players before qualifiers for the 2026 World Cup.
Maikeli was born and grew up in Utah, but his father is Tongan. What’s more, he and his wife, Cassidy, were at a crossroads, wanting a change but not sure what it could be. They had talked about leaving the country and wanting to raise their three children somewhere other than the United States.
Moving over 6,000 miles to Tonga, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, wasn’t on their list of options, but once Maikeli saw the call out, the cogs whirred, the possibilities started flying around his head and excitement rose.
“I turned to (Cassidy) and said, ‘Hey, the Tonga football association has said they’re looking for players’,” Maikeli tells The Athletic. “She was like, ‘You have to, you’ve gotta do it. Do whatever you have to do, please’.”
Maikeli sent off his information, including videos of him playing, and he was invited to Tonga for a two-week trial. At that point, it started to feel more real for Maikeli and, by the sounds of things, a little jarring for Cassidy.
“When they emailed me back, she immediately started crying,” says Maikeli. “I thought she was happy for me, but she kept saying, ‘Oh my god, we’re actually doing this, we’re really moving to Tonga. I thought this was a joke’. She couldn’t believe it was happening.”
But it was. Maikeli went out to Tonga in the first week of July and the trial turned into an invitation to join the squad. Cassidy, along with their three daughters (Maia, aged six, and twins Jojo and Honey, about to turn four), had stayed in Texas, where they had temporarily moved after selling their business, a pottery studio, to live with her parents. They headed out to join him in August.
“I don’t think it really sank in until we were coming,” Cassidy says. “Because even when he was in Tonga, it was weird because he was gone, but… I thought it was a joke, and the next thing I knew I had three kids in line at TSA and… it was not a joke.”
Maikeli has never played at a professional or semi-professional level before, but he is not a novice. He played to a good standard at high school and was awarded a scholarship to play at college. But when he was 18, he served on a religious mission (he’s a member of the Church of the Latter-day Saints) and couldn’t get his scholarship deferred. After that, he just played at a reasonable amateur level, for fun.
So why would Tonga want someone with such a relatively modest playing experience? The short answer is that they struggle for players, both in numbers and quality. Rugby union is, by a distance, the country’s most popular sport, and that hoovers up most of the athletic talent. On an island where the population is around 100,000, there is not a huge pool to begin with.
Things look a little brighter in the future: football is becoming more and more popular in schools, so in theory there will be more players in a few years. But they needed players now, regardless of level. The current squad has one professional: Australia-born winger Ata ‘AJ’ Inia, who plays for Thai second-tier side Chanthaburi.
It has been a difficult few years for soccer in Tonga. The men’s team went four years without playing a game between 2019 and 2023, due to Covid-19 and the eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, a submarine volcano near Tonga’s main island, which caused a series of tsunamis, forcing them to withdraw from 2022 World Cup qualification.
That gap of games caused them to briefly be dropped from FIFA’s rankings, but they’re back now and, partly helped by a series of initiatives from the world’s governing body (including a visit from Gianni Infantino last year), things are looking more promising.
It’s a slight exaggeration to say that the Lomus got rid of all their worldly goods specifically to move to Tonga. They had already sold their pottery studio back in Utah because they had decided they needed something new, a fresh start of some description. When Tonga came up, they accelerated this process: their car went, then clothes and a bunch of other possessions that they couldn’t take with them.
So this opportunity came at the perfect time. As much as moving to a tiny country in the middle of the Pacific to pursue a slightly speculative dream of playing in World Cup qualifiers can be perfect.
It’s also worth noting that while they have spent some time in Tonga before, it was only two weeks, on holiday in 2019, when they stayed in a resort. Slightly different to staying with relatives, even if those relatives have been very welcoming.
“We’re in our twenties,” explains Cassidy, when I ask if they’re naturally impulsive people. “We’ve lived a lot of life in those years. We’ve owned our own studio, we’ve moved across the world — it’s stuff a lot of people wouldn’t even do.
“That’s just our policy and how we live. If it’s possible, we always say yes and we make it work. Yes, we’re impulsive, but I think we’re humble enough to know when we’ve failed and we ask for help.”
There’s a pause. “Impulsive, delusional… I don’t know.”
Every time I ask Maikeli a question that emphasises how big, significant, unusual, crazy this whole idea is, he chuckles and says, “Yeahhh,” as if we’re talking about moving six miles away, not 6,000.
Nonetheless, he has offered Cassidy several opportunities to veto the whole thing.
“I definitely didn’t back out,” Cassidy says. “When I saw his face, there’s no way I could’ve backed out. He had already put himself out there so there’s no way I could’ve taken that away from him. It’s too big of an opportunity.”
After my conversation with Maikeli, I confess I wasn’t entirely convinced about how ‘on board’ Cassidy was. But after speaking to her one-on-one a couple of weeks later, it’s clear that she is embracing the adventure. She’s also emphatic in saying that, if the roles were reversed, Maikeli would go through the struggle for her.
And it was a struggle. It took two days to travel from Houston, Cassidy loaded down with luggage and three children — “I channelled my inner ox,” she says — although she was helped by her friend, Brittany, who joined them to help, and for the adventure.
There have also been a few encounters with local wildlife that have caused pause for thought. “I won’t lie,” says Cassidy. “I did tell him twice today to buy me a plane ticket because I want to go home: there was a giant spider in the shower last night, and also some nasty cockroaches. But I took a nap and got over it.”
One of the problems on the football front has been equipment and, to a slightly lesser extent, facilities. There isn’t a huge amount of money flying around at the Tongan FA, but it does at least have one pretty good training facility with five pitches, decent changing rooms and sleeping quarters for players.
However, training cones, dummies and even balls have to be shared by the senior teams and the juniors. If someone further up the food chain gets there first, tough luck. Boots are also a problem: the senior team all have their own, but many are threadbare, held together with tape and Maikeli saw one player running across the training pitches to borrow boots from his brother, who had just played in a different game.
The Lomus tried to help out: they got details of the players that needed new boots and their sizes, and they were planning to put out an appeal to see if anyone could help. But before they could do that, Cassidy’s sister and her husband bought all of the boots and she brought them over from America. They literally have buy-in from the whole family.
Speaking of family: what of the other three people involved in this caper — Maikeli and Cassidy’s daughters? How do you persuade girls aged four, four and six that moving away from home and to an island thousands of miles away is a good idea?
“We told them they were going to live on the same island as Moana,” says Cassidy.
Sold. There was also the appeal of plenty of new cousins to play with, plus a pre-move trip to Disneyland to sweeten the deal. So far, despite not yet meeting Moana, they seem to be enjoying their new life.
“I don’t think some of the players realise how insane it is to have the opportunity to play in a World Cup qualifier,” says Cassidy. “There are all these trolls who will say, ‘You’ll never make it to the World Cup’ — but they could.”
It feels churlish to point out how much of a long shot it is for Tonga to reach the finals in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. in 2026. Tonga are in the Oceania qualifiers, so not exactly competing with world-beaters, but they must get through a mini pre-qualifying tournament to even reach the group stage of the qualifiers — they face the Cook Islands in a single-game tie tomorrow (Thursday). If they win they play American Samoa or Samoa.
It will be extraordinary if Tonga even make it to the group, where they would compete with New Zealand, Tahiti and Vanuatu.
Lomu and his new Tongan colleagues (Courtesy of Maikeli Lomu)
The elephant in the room for the Lomus: what if things don’t go to plan? What if, in the medium or longer term, Maikeli doesn’t get into the team? What if the whole football thing doesn’t pan out? Maikeli played in the pre-qualifying friendlies against local clubs in Samoa, but there are no guarantees. What’s Plan B?
“As of now, I have no idea,” Maikeli says. “I’m not necessarily banking on being a professional player. I am trying to earn some income on social media if I can. I have a couple of qualifications in teaching, so I could get a job here that would set my family up pretty OK.”
Cassidy also has a few plans to make money: teaching pottery (she brought a wheel and when we spoke had just acquired some clay), and maybe selling tacos at the booth the wider Lomu family has at a local market.
They are loosely planning to give their new life until at least Christmas, but they also know that they could leave pretty much whenever they want
“I’d be perfectly fine if we don’t like it here and move back to Texas,” says Maikeli. “We’d be starting in the same place that we are right now. I would have had this amazing experience that I would never have imagined I would have. I wouldn’t be upset about moving back. We’re just playing it by the wind, seeing where it takes us.
“We’re trying to figure it out, how to build a life here. I’d love to build a house and be able to come and go from the island as much as I want. We’re trying.”
Cassidy adds: “We did say that we’ll stay here as long as it works, and as soon as it stops working we’ll go back to Texas.”
The interesting thing is that ‘working’ does not necessarily seem to equal Maikeli establishing himself in the Tonga team. Obviously, that would be great, but he doesn’t have designs on becoming a professional. Playing one game for Tonga sounds like it would be enough.
“I think anything that I’ve done already is an accomplishment for me six months ago,” he says. “I never thought I would have a chance of playing a game in a FIFA-regulated situation. Playing one game would be a dream come true, but the life I get to live afterwards is the cherry on top.
“If I get to live my life in the place that my family comes from, that would be beautiful. Everything I’ve done so far has been like a dream come true.”
GO DEEPER
New Caledonia – the Pacific paradise that became a football talent factory
(Top photos: Maikeli Lomu and the Tongan FA)
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5738569/2024/09/04/maikeli-lomu-tonga/
