When Martyn Jackson walked off the pitch after Ramsbottom United’s 2-1 win over Cheadle Town in October 2024, becoming a World Cup winner was not something that crossed his mind. Within days, his only goal was staying alive.
Two days after that final whistle, Jackson began to feel unwell during the night. He went into hospital and was diagnosed with myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart usually caused by an infection. Within weeks he had been placed on the super urgent waiting list for a transplant, and doctors had to fit his heart with a mechanical pump to keep him alive. His life was saved when a donor heart became available, and on 28 November 2024 he underwent successful surgery at Wythenshawe Hospital in Greater Manchester.
Fast forward to September 2026 and Jackson was scoring for England in a 5-1 win over Spain in the final of the Transplant Football World Cup in Frankfurt. England beat six teams on the way to that final, scoring 36 goals, and the victory came three days before the start of Organ Donation Week. Every player in the tournament, team-mates and opponents alike, was the recipient of a donor organ.
“Obviously, when you’ve had a transplant, you don’t think you’re ever going to play again. That’s what I thought anyway,” Jackson said. “I’ll be forever grateful to my donor and the family for what they’ve given me. They’ve given me the gift of life and the opportunity to live my life to the fullest.”
The football itself looks different from the game played at a Fifa World Cup. Matches are seven-a-side and played over 20-minute halves, and contact is “not as aggressive as I was used to”, in Jackson’s words, reflecting how delicate each player’s body is after life-altering surgery. As a heart recipient, he manages his exercise workload more carefully than many of his team-mates, a large number of whom have had kidney transplants — the most common transplant in the UK. His role tends to come in 10-minute bursts rather than full matches.
Jackson had spent his youth career in the academy at Manchester United, followed by spells at Blackburn Rovers, Preston North End and Burnley, before he stopped pursuing a professional career and spent 13 years with clubs across the non-league pyramid. He was playing 11-a-side football in the ninth tier of the English game before his surgery, and became a game-changing addition to the national transplant team when he joined up with the squad in January 2026. It was his wife, Lucy, who heard about the chance to join an England Transplant FC team on social media during his recovery.
Daley Cross, the England manager, who combines the role with his job as a youth worker, said of Lucy’s part in it: “She was just trying to do her best for him and trying to find a way to motivate him. His wife did drop in the conversation that he used to play at Manchester United as a schoolboy. So that got our ears twitched instantly. You could tell from him being on the pitch, even though he was so fresh into his journey, that he knew the football game and he would be such an incredible asset to us.”
Cross added that players can find themselves “in a dark place, at the time of diagnosis, through your treatment or even post-transplant”, and that the team exists to help and inspire them. “That really is the power of it: to that transplant community or to the world, showing people that when you’ve had organ failure, your life isn’t over,” he said.
The wider context is a shortage of donors. Dr Paul Callan, a consultant cardiologist at Wythenshawe Hospital’s Heart and Lung Centre, who worked with Jackson during his diagnosis and recovery, said the average wait on the urgent transplant list had risen from around seven days to as much as 14, with roughly 10% of patients placed on the list becoming too poorly and having to be taken off it. The super urgent list Jackson was placed on is the highest of three tiers of patients waiting for a new heart, typically containing only about four or five people in the UK at any one time. The longer waits follow a reduction in organ donors in the UK, with a 9% drop recorded in 2026 compared with the same period the previous year. NHS Blood and Transplant says the 8,700 people currently waiting for a donor organ is an all-time high, and Organ Donation Week, which runs from 21-28 September, has brought an urgent response plan from the NHS to address the decline.
Jackson has not yet met the family of the donor whose heart he received, and says he is considering reaching out to them around the two-year anniversary of his surgery. Dr Callan described a recovery on that timescale, culminating in playing football at a Transplant World Cup, as “remarkable”. Bayern Munich’s Alphonso Davies, who was diagnosed with a mild form of myocarditis in 2022, was sidelined for nearly five months and underwent specialist cardiac monitoring before returning to play.
For Jackson, the fear of that period is something he describes plainly. “Of course it was extremely scary,” he said, “but at that stage, when you are critically ill, there’s not really much you can do about it. You have to accept it.” Cross, meanwhile, wants the message to travel further. “It is so important to spread that message, have that conversation about organ donation, because our team only exists for that reason,” he said. “I wouldn’t have 16 players to manage if we didn’t have organ donation. And England wouldn’t have just gone and won a World Cup.”