Like many great and unusual ideas the inspiration for founding South Sudan’s first blind football team came during lockdown.

It was 2020 and Simon Madol Akol was looking for ways to help the disability inclusion charity Light for the World when he discovered the sport. Able to see himself, he had no idea that it could be played by people without vision. But the opportunity was there.

“This is possible,” he remembers thinking. “This is something that can be done.”

The team’s beginnings were humble, but it was always ambitious. Named the Bright Stars – just like South Sudan’s national team – at the start it had just two players.

One of them was current captain Martin Lado, who was born with limited vision but remembers promising himself to pour energy and focus into the team, hoping that “one day it will make us proud”.

From these origins, the team has gone on to win an international championship in Uganda and is now training for the Paralympics.

But all this was yet to come, and first, they had to learn the rules of the game.

Blind football is played five-a-side rather than 11, using a ball containing a bell which makes a faint rattling sound as players chase it down the field. They shout “voy” – “I’m coming” in Spanish – to warn others of their approach. Mr Lado remembers colliding with his teammates constantly as they learned the ropes.

In those early days, the team practised on a dusty field outside of Rajaf Education Centre for the Blind – the country’s only school for the visually impaired – where a gnarled tree served as one of the goalposts. Despite the challenges, Mr Lado was excited and tried to recruit more players.

Among them was his best friend Yona Sabri Ellon, who’d been a promising striker at junior level before developing glaucoma at the age of ten. His family had struggled to find treatment, and Mr Ellon eventually lost his sight entirely. For a while, he thought he was the only person his age to have gone blind.

“We can now play football again,” Mr Lado told him.

Mr Ellon smiles widely as he remembers the moment.

“I regained my hope and joined the team,” he says.

South Sudan has one of the highest populations of blind people anywhere, according to the World Population Review. Diseases like onchocerciasis, or river blindness, and trachoma are common, spread by parasitic worms and bacteria.

Dr Emanuel Agwella is one of only eight ophthalmologists in the country. Seven are based in the capital city of Juba, meaning that people living outside of the capital struggle to access proper care.

As a result, Dr Agwella explains, “blindness in South Sudan is mainly due to preventable causes.” Even if they can get to a hospital, stigma associated with the loss of vision means blind children are often pulled from lessons by their parents or kept hidden away.

“There is a belief that people with visual impairment cannot do anything – that they are not productive; they cannot go to school; they cannot learn, and they cannot even feed themselves,” says Sophia Mohammed, the South Sudan country director at Light for the World. The charity and the Adidas Foundation support the blind football team with equipment and pay to hire the only field in the country suitable for visually impaired players.

For many athletes, playing with the Bright Stars provides a sense of community again.

Walking to practice, players told The Telegraph that passers-by mock them for playing football.

“They will start laughing at you. They will say that maybe you are going to waste your time. They will start calling you names,” says Mr Lado, the team captain. Juba’s streets are uneven and traffic is thick, another hazard for the visually impaired.

But on the field, the players are at home. “We see ourselves as brothers,” says Stephen Akim, a defender. Mr Hakim was blinded some twenty years ago while fighting as a child soldier during the Second Sudanese Civil War, which ran from 1983 to 2005.

Conflict is another major cause of blindness in South Sudan. The country won its independence in 2011, but fighting between the President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar erupted almost immediately, dividing the nation and its people along ethnic lines. Conflict has continued sporadically ever since.

It was during this post-independence war that Mr Akol fled his home and settled in a displacement camp. A keen football player and a Chelsea fan, Mr Akol saw there first-hand how sport could soothe tribal tensions.

In the six years since Mr Akol began coaching the team, the Bright Stars has swelled to some 40 players. Last October eight of them boarded a bus to Uganda for their first international tournament, playing against blind football teams from the host country and Zimbabwe.

Mr Ellon, the striker, put away goals, while Mr Akol watched eagerly from the sidelines with his arms folded. South Sudan went on to win each of the three matches it played and win the tournament.

It is the first time a national sports team brought a trophy back to South Sudan. As a result, Mr Akol hopes the players can reduce discrimination visually impaired people still face.

“They are now treated as champions,” Mr Akol says. “People don’t see a disability first. They see a champion first.

“They’ve come to realise that disability is not inability,” Mr Akim adds, proudly.

Winning the tournament in Uganda means that the team has moved up to Division One of the IBSA Blind Football Championship. In November, they’ll play top ranked teams from across the African continent in the Paralympic qualifiers in Egypt. If the Bright Stars win, they’ll go all the way to Los Angeles in 2028.

Mr Ellon is confident but the crucial qualifiers are not the only hurdle the team has to clear.

Mr Akol is still looking for ways to raise the money for participation fees, as well as flights, hotel rooms and food for the team.

“It is a great responsibility for us. This is something we are looking forward to doing … but there is a lot that is required,” says Mr Akol.

For now, the Bright Stars practice.

The squad meets every Saturday. Moses Mayiik Chok, one of team’s youngest members, has taken a speciality ball back home with him and kicks it around every morning and evening – that is after watching sighted athletes play football on the pitch outside his house, a cousin whispering live commentary on the game into his ear.

Mr Chok wants to bring recognition to his country through sport. Continued conflict means that some 75 per cent of the population still lives in poverty, according to the World Bank.

But Mr Chok doesn’t want to be defined by these statistics. “We are going to be known through our football clubs,” he said proudly.

The Bright Stars and its players are already inspiring other young visually impaired people.

Simon Loku is a 13-year-old student at Rajaf Education Centre for the Blind, where the Bright Stars first began practicing. He is one of some 27 pupils. The students run their fingers over braille sheets, laughing together between lessons.

Simon plays football every day after school, just like Mr Chok, guided by sighted friends. The boy beams the minute his feet touch the ball, running fearlessly around rocks and holes in the ground. His favourite player on the Bright Stars is the team captain, Mr Lado, and one day he hopes to join the team himself. “I love blind football,” the aspiring footballer says.

While their first goal is qualifying for the Paralympics, perhaps the most important is to bring on more new players so that blind football can take root across South Sudan.

Meanwhile, Light for the World is working to set up more teams outside of the capital.

“We are not going to be there forever. We are going to retire,” Mr Lado says. When that happens, he says, new people are welcome to take his place.

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