I gave up football for God

Former professional footballer Khallil Lambin, 33, has revealed how he walked away from a glittering career to follow God’s call – swapping stadiums for service and football boots for faith.

Born in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, in 1992, Lambin was raised in a devout Muslim family before fleeing the country’s civil war at the age of seven. “We had to run away,” he recalled. “Because of my French bloodline, we moved to Paris. I was 12 when I lost my mum – she went to bed one night and never woke up.”

Football became his refuge. “If you ask any member of my family, they’ll say: when they see Khallil, they see him playing football,” he told UCB’s ‘The Big Man Up Top’ podcast. His talent took him from Thailand’s GMG Academy to trials at Arsenal, where he trained alongside Cesc Fàbregas and Carlos Vela. He later signed for clubs in Qatar, Greece and Switzerland, scoring goals by the dozen.

But behind the success, Lambin was questioning everything. “The more I read the Qur’an, the more I saw Isa – Jesus – and I realised he was sinless,” he said. “So I prayed: ‘Isa, if you are God, reveal yourself to me.’ 

“The very next day, in Geneva, a pastor stopped me and said, ‘Young man, Jesus loves you.’ That broke me.”

In August 2016, Lambin gave his life to Christ – and soon faced the biggest test of his faith. “God said to me, ‘Give me your Isaac.’ For me, Isaac was football,” he explained. “Everything I had was football. So giving it up felt like dying.”

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