By Sheriff Bojang Jnr
From Uganda to Thailand, Laos and Malaysia, Dubai to Egypt, Lithuania to Germany, and on to Portugal, Slovakia and Denmark, Akot Sonny Garang’s career has been shaped by visa denials, missed flights, freezing winters, spells of homelessness and failed trials. Still, he keeps moving, convinced the next restart might finally be the one.
On paper, Sonny’s football CV reads like an error message. Countries blur; clubs arrive briefly, then vanish. It feels less like a career than a sequence of abrupt exits, already crowded with endings for a 24-year-old.
After so many false starts, even the language falls apart. The phrase ‘Europe-trotting footballer’ suggests contracts, money and ascent.
Strip that away, Sonny says, and what remains is movement without arrival. “I’m still moving from club to club,” he explains, “trying to find a place where I can say, this is it.”
In reality, that movement is governed by logistics, “calculating bus fares, choosing between food and transport, timing visa applications and training through cold mornings when your body lags and a club’s patience runs out”. It is the learned skill of starting again.
Before football meant escape
Sonny’s story did not begin with football. It started with cattle and a boy watching the sun drop while others played in his home village of Warawar in South Sudan.
“I used to be a cattle herder back in the village,” he says. By the time the work was done each evening, the other boys had finished playing. “Time was gone,” he says. “I couldn’t play.”
Once, he ran to the field to play football anyway, leaving the cattle unattended. His uncle caught him. “He beat me up,” Sonny says.
In 2009, he relocated to neighbouring Uganda to live with relatives. One evening, walking past a bar near the family home on his way to a shop, he caught a football match on television. Manchester United was playing – it was “beautiful”.
Not long after, Sonny joined a nearby academy. He scored in his first friendly. In his final year of high school, his team narrowly missed qualifying for Uganda’s Coca-Cola National Schools Championship, eliminated by King’s College Budo.
A contract interrupted by gunfire
In 2016, Sonny returned to South
Sudan and signed with Rainbow FC in the first division. It felt like a foothold. Then the training turned into a war story.
“We were training around five o’clock,” he says. “Then gunshots started. The coach said, ‘don’t run’.” Gunshots were normal in the country then.
Seconds later, everyone ran anyway. Sonny tried to cross the road. “They shot someone in front of me,” he says. “So I had to make a U-turn.”
He spent nearly four days away from home with no bag, no phone, no plan. When he returned, the decision was immediate. “It’s not safe for me here,” he says. “I just wanted somewhere safe.”
Uganda offered safety, but not direction. Back there, he played community tournaments and quickly grew impatient. “I realised they were not taking me anywhere,” he says. He drifted from friends whose ambitions felt smaller. “Those guys were there to study. They’re not close to where I want to be.”
Scams, Spain and selling land
Sonny went online. On Facebook, a man calling himself “Roy Messing” offered an opportunity to play in Croatia with NK Osijek, for a fee. Sonny didn’t have the money. He involved two friends. One used part of his tuition. Another sold his sister’s laptop.
“It was a scam,” he says.
For many players, this is where the dream ends. For Sonny, it didn’t. “It never changed my mind,” he says.
In 2018, he returned to South Sudan and signed with Al-Rabita FC in Juba. By season’s end, he was invited to the preliminary selection for South Sudan’s under-23 squad preparing for Olympic qualifiers.
He didn’t make the final cut, but the call-up convinced him he could make it in football, just not at home. Even after switching to Amarat United, then the country’s top club, his plan was already to leave.
A proposed trial in Spain with UD Sanse offered another route. To finance it, Sonny sold a piece of land he had bought while playing in South Sudan. He travelled to Nairobi for the visa. It was denied.
“I realised if I stayed, the money would be wasted,” he says.
Thailand, he discovered, was accessible on a tourist visa. The ticket cost $1,200. Sonny had $500. His best friend Akot Jamesco added $100. Another friend, Duot Mitcho, sent $100. Still short, Jamesco handed him his girlfriend’s laptop to sell.
No buyer emerged. Sonny took the $700 and the laptop to a travel agency. “The agent laughed,” he says. “She thought I was insane.”
Southeast Asia without footing
When he finally arrived in Thailand in early 2020 – despite warnings not to come as the transfer window closed – he had no money.
“When I arrived, I didn’t know where to go,” he says.
After tracking down the agent’s address in Rangsit, on Bangkok’s outskirts, he was sent to a pre-season trial. It came to nothing. He asked to be taken into the city, where he lived rough and slept on the streets.
Days later, the agent called. Another club had scouted him and wanted to sign him, but only if Amarat United, his last club back in Juba, issued a release letter despite Sonny being a free agent. With the window closing, Amarat demanded a fee that the Thai club refused to pay. The deal collapsed.
Sonny moved on to Laos, but the closure of the domestic league there forced him out. With no money to travel, a couple he met at a backpackers’ hostel – Ben from Scotland and Lina from Lithuania – bought him a return ticket to Malaysia, a visa-free destination.
In Malaysia, he impressed at a trial. Then Covid hit and football shut down. Stranded, he slept on a corridor floor in a local man’s house for months, cleaning rooms and toilets in exchange for shelter. After a year without playing, he earned two trials. One succeeded.
He signed for Kuala Kangsar FC and was placed in a hotel. “My life became lavish,” Sonny says, laughing.
It didn’t last. As Covid cases rose in Malaysia and fans were barred from stadiums, clubs cut costs by terminating foreign players’ contracts. Kuala Kangsar let him go and failed to pay his six months’ salary.
Hopes of signing for another club collapsed under the same financial pressures. The two months he had earned vanished into rent arrears and basic expenses.
When the money ran out, Sonny was back in familiar territory, forced to leave again.
Dubai, Lithuania and Germany
The UAE came next. Adam Cheverie, a Canadian he met in Laos, bought him a ticket to Dubai. While staying with a South Sudanese friend, Thiep Kiir, he learned via Facebook that Al Hilal United were holding open trials. Two hundred and sixty-five players showed up. Eight were offered contracts.
“I was one of them,” Sonny says.
Then came the medical. “I failed.” The contract vanished. Al Hilal told him to resolve the issue and return. He went back to South Sudan, then to Egypt for treatment. He never returned to the UAE. A later opportunity in Croatia fell through when the visa was denied.
Lithuania finally opened a door. He signed late with FK Minija, missing pre-season and arriving in the middle of winter. “From the airport, I couldn’t even pull my bag,” he says. “Zero degrees.”
His body needed time. The club didn’t have it. His contract was quickly terminated. The club president gave him €50 ($58). Sonny bought the cheapest bus ticket he could afford and headed to Berlin, where football was on winter break.
Homeless again, he searched online for teams. One invited him to train. After a single session, they wanted to sign him. They gave him meals, a place to stay, routine. He debuted. They won. His name appeared in a German newspaper.
On the final day of the season, the club was relegated. He had to leave.
Portugal, Slovakia and waiting
Portugal followed. While awaiting residency, Sonny worked in construction before Bruno Simão, a Portuguese man he met, helped him find work as a bicycle mechanic. “I was being paid,” Sonny says, “but football was the dream”.
He quit when a club signed him. He scored on his debut and later played for three other lower-division sides in Portugal.
A trial in Slovakia followed, but paperwork delayed his arrival. When permission finally came, there was one day left in the transfer window and the squad was full.
A lower-division club signed him for the final five games of the season. When it ended, Sonny moved to Denmark, a place to wait and hope. Wages were promised. No job came.
Messages followed, including interest from Romania. If all goes to plan, that is where he expects to go in January 2026.
“If I don’t succeed now, it won’t be because of bureaucracy or weather,” he says, training in Copenhagen. “It’ll be because I don’t try hard or I’m not good enough.”
The only time he cried
Despite everything, Sonny insists he rarely breaks. “If I start sobbing,” he says, “I’ll lose myself.”
There was one exception. “It wasn’t when I was homeless,” he says. “It was when I had a house. I would wake up and it was so quiet. I missed my grandma.”
Quitting was always an option. He chose not to take it. Football gave him resilience, “a map of kindness across borders”, but it also cost him “time, ease and certainty”.
Sonny no longer imagines too far ahead. “Expectations don’t always align with reality,” he says. “I don’t expect anything anymore. My goal is simply to stay healthy, stay free and keep moving.”
theafricareport.com
