It began 10 years ago, when I got some money to make a film about African football. It didn’t exactly work out the way I had planned.

It was 2009, the year before the World Cup was going to be played in Africa for the first time and I was going to make a film about the power of football in Africa. I had worked around the continent as a journalist for many years, and I loved football, so this was a dream project for me.

The question I set out to answer was: could an African team win the World Cup for the first time? The great Pelé had predicted it would happen before the turn of the millennium, but he was wrong. Not only had no African team won it, no team had even advanced to the quarterfinals. But maybe it would be different now that Africa had home advantage.

One contender was Nigeria. Of all the places I had been to in Africa, I could think of no country crazier about football than Nigeria and I knew that’s where I had to start my story. I ended up at the Nigeria national stadium in Lagos, the country’s commercial capital. It’s a meeting ground for people to come and play football and get discovered.

It was there, on a dirt pitch outside the stadium, that I first met them. A motley crew of guys who told me they were the Nigerian national amputee football team. I had never heard of amputee football. These guys had all lost a leg, except for the goalkeepers who only had one arm, and now they played football on crutches, seven-a-side, in the heat and the dust. It looked brutally hard.

At the same time, there was a joy and passion to their game. A sense of purity. It was as if they had reclaimed the game that I knew and loved and given it new meaning. And that’s when I started thinking: maybe the story wasn’t about the World Cup.

But I was wrong.

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