What would inspire you to give up your old life and move thousands of miles away to a small country where you previously only lived for two weeks?
For Maikeli Lomu it was a message on Facebook.
He was taking a break from working on his laptop when he saw the ad. It was a call from the Tongan Football Association, asking for players for the 2026 World Cup qualifying matches.
Maikeli was born and raised in Utah, but his father is Tongan. He and his wife Cassidy were also at a crossroads. They wanted a change, but didn’t know what that would be. They had talked about leaving the country and raising their three children somewhere other than the United States.
Moving to Tonga, which is over 6,000 miles away and in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, wasn’t on their bucket list. But when Maikeli saw the call, the wheels started turning, the possibilities started racing through his head and the excitement started to build.
“I turned to (Cassidy) and said, ‘Hey, the Tonga Football Association has said they are looking for players,’” Maikeli said. The Athletics. “She was like, ‘You have to do it, you have to do it. Do what you have to do, please.'”
Maikeli sent his information, including videos of him playing, and he was invited to Tonga for a two-week trial. At that point, however, it started to feel like a bit of a shock to Maikeli and, it seems, a bit of a shock to Cassidy.
“When they emailed me back, she immediately started crying,” Maikeli says. “I thought she was happy for me, but she kept saying, ‘Oh my god, we’re really doing this, we’re really moving to Tonga. I thought this was a joke.’ She couldn’t believe it was happening.”
But that was it. Maikeli went to Tonga in the first week of July and the trial became an invitation to join the team. Cassidy, along with their three daughters (Maia, age six, and twins Jojo and Honey, almost four), had remained in Texas, where they had temporarily relocated after selling their pottery business to live with her parents. They went to be with him in August.
“I don’t think it really hit us until we got there,” Cassidy says. “Because even when he was in Tonga, it was weird that he was gone, but… I thought it was a joke, and the next thing I know I had three kids standing in line at the TSA and… it wasn’t a joke.”
Maikeli has never played at a professional or semi-professional level, but he is not a beginner. He played at a good level in high school and got a scholarship to play at university. But when he was 18, he served on a religious mission (he is a member of the Church of the Latter-day Saints) and his scholarship could not be deferred. After that, he just played at a fairly amateur level, for fun.
So why would Tonga want someone with such a relatively modest playing experience? The short answer is that they struggle to find players, both in numbers and quality. Rugby union is by far the most popular sport in the country, and that sucks up the majority of the athletic talent. On an island with a population of around 100,000, there isn’t a large pool to begin with.
The future looks a little brighter: football is becoming 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: Australian-born winger Ata ‘AJ’ Inia, who plays for Thai second division club Chanthaburi.
It has been a difficult few years for football in Tonga. The men’s team went four years without a match between 2019 and 2023, due to Covid-19 and the eruption of Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, an undersea volcano near the main island of Tonga, which caused a series of tsunamis, forcing them to withdraw from qualifying for the 2022 World Cup.
That gap in the number of games played saw them temporarily disappear from the FIFA rankings, but now they are back and, thanks in part to a series of initiatives from the world governing body (including a visit from Gianni Infantino last year), things are looking promising.
It is a bit of an exaggeration to say that the Lomus got rid of all their worldly goods specifically to move to Tonga. They had already sold their pottery in Utah because they decided they needed something new, a fresh start of some kind. When Tonga came along, they accelerated this process: their car went, then clothes and a lot of other possessions they could not take with them.
So this opportunity came at the perfect time. Just like moving to a small country in the middle of the Pacific Ocean to pursue a somewhat speculative dream of competing in World Cup qualifiers can be perfect.
It’s also worth noting that they’ve spent some time in Tonga before, but it was only for two weeks, on holiday in 2019, when they stayed at a resort. A bit different from staying with relatives, although those relatives have been very welcoming.
“We’re in our 20s,” Cassidy explains, when I ask if they’re impulsive people by nature. “We’ve lived a lot in those years. We’ve had our own studio, we’ve moved halfway around the world — it’s stuff that 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 make it work. Yes, we’re impulsive, but I think we’re humble enough to know when we’ve failed and ask for help.”
There is a silence. “Impulsive, delusional… I don’t know.”
Every time I ask Maikeli a question that emphasizes how big, important, unusual and crazy this whole idea is, he laughs and says, “Yeahhh,” as if we’re talking about moving six miles away, not 6,000.
Nevertheless, he has given Cassidy several opportunities to veto the entire proposal.
“I definitely didn’t back down,” Cassidy says. “When I saw his face, there was no way I could back down. He had already exposed himself, so I couldn’t have taken that away from him. It’s too big an opportunity.”
After my conversation with Maikeli, I have to admit that I wasn’t entirely convinced of how ‘on board’ Cassidy was. But after speaking with her one-on-one a few weeks later, it’s clear that she’s embracing the adventure. She also makes a point of saying that if the tables were turned, Maikeli would fight for her.
And it was a struggle. It took two days to travel from Houston, Cassidy laden with luggage and three children — “I channeled my inner ox,” she says — though she was helped along by her friend, Brittany, who joined them for help and for the adventure.
There have also been a few encounters with local wildlife that have gotten me thinking. “I’m not going to lie,” Cassidy says. “I’ve told him to buy me a plane ticket twice today because I wanted to get home: There was a giant spider in the shower last night and some nasty cockroaches. But I took a nap and got over it.”
One of the problems in football is the equipment and, to a lesser extent, the facilities. There is not a lot of money involved in the Tongan FA, but there is a reasonably good training facility with five pitches, decent changing rooms and sleeping accommodation for players.
Training cones, dummies and even balls have to be shared between the senior teams and the juniors. If someone higher up the food chain gets there first, then that’s bad luck. Shoes are also a problem: the senior teams all have their own shoes, but many are worn out and held together with tape. Maikeli saw a player running across the training field to borrow shoes from his brother, who had just played in another match.
The Lomus tried to help: they got details of the players who needed new boots and their sizes, and they planned 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 the boots and she brought them over from America. They literally have the support of the whole family.
Speaking of family, what about the other three people involved in this affair—Maikeli and Cassidy’s daughters? How do you convince girls ages four, four, and six that it’s a good idea to leave home and go to an island thousands of miles away?
“We told them they were going to live on the same island as Moana,” Cassidy says.
Sold. There was also the added bonus of lots of new cousins to play with, plus a pre-move trip to Disneyland to sweeten the deal. So far they seem to be enjoying their new life, despite not having met Moana yet.
“I don’t think some players realise how insane it is to get the chance to play in a World Cup qualifier,” Cassidy says. “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 remote Tonga’s chances are of reaching the finals in Canada, Mexico and the US in 2026. Tonga are in the Oceania qualifiers, so aren’t exactly competitive with the world’s top teams, but they have to go through a mini-pre-qualifier to even reach the group stage of the qualifiers – they play the Cook Islands tomorrow (Thursday) in a draw. A win would see them play either American Samoa or Samoa.
It would be special if Tonga reached the group, where they would face New Zealand, Tahiti and Vanuatu.
Lomu and his new Tongan colleagues (thanks to Maikeli Lomu)
The elephant in the room for Lomus: what if things don’t go to plan? What if Maikeli doesn’t make the team in the medium to long term? What if the whole football thing doesn’t work out? Maikeli played in the pre-qualifiers against local clubs in Samoa, but there are no guarantees. What’s Plan B?
“I don’t have any idea yet,” says Maikeli. “I’m not necessarily counting on becoming a professional player. I’m trying to make some money on social media if I can. I have some qualifications in teaching, so I could get a job here that would support my family reasonably well.”
Cassidy also has a few plans to make money: she wants to teach pottery (she brought a potter’s wheel with her and had just bought some clay when we spoke) and maybe sell tacos at the Lomu family’s stall at a local market.
They plan to give their new life until at least Christmas, but they also know they can leave at almost any time if they want.
“I would be fine if we didn’t like it here and moved back to Texas,” Maikeli says. “We would start in the same place we are now. I would have had this amazing experience that I never expected. I wouldn’t be mad about moving back. We’ll just go with the flow and see where it takes us.
“We’re trying to figure out how to build a life here. I’d like to build a house and be able to go to and from the island as often as I want. We’re trying.”
Cassidy added: “We said we’re going to stay here as long as it works, and as soon as it stops working, we’re going back to Texas.”
The interesting thing is that ‘working’ doesn’t necessarily mean Maikeli will establish himself in the Tonga team. That would be great of course, but he has no plans to turn pro. Playing one game for Tonga sounds like enough.
“I think everything I’ve done six months ago is an achievement for me,” he says. “I never thought I would get a chance to play a match in a FIFA-regulated situation. Playing one match would be a dream come true, but the life I get to live after that is the icing on the cake.
“If I could live my life where my family came from, that would be wonderful. Everything I’ve done so far is like a dream come true.”
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(Top photos: Maikeli Lomu and the Tongan FA)
