Gaël Kakuta, once hailed as a teenage prodigy who wore the Chelsea badge, has given a testimony that will make believers sit up and secular skeptics squirm. The former Chelsea and RC Lens midfielder told RMC Sport’s After FC that, in the midst of personal collapse and exile in Iran, he finally found the Savior his mother had always pointed him toward.
Kakuta’s story is the kind of personal comeback that the woke sports media never wants to highlight: after losing his mother, enduring a divorce and wrestling with depression, a reluctant move to Iran stripped away distractions and left him face to face with the Bible she left him. He says the Holy Spirit drew him there, that he opened the scriptures and his heart, and that the experience changed everything.
The player even told hosts he was baptized after returning home, and that faith now governs his life and priorities instead of fame, ego and fleeting endorsements. That this spiritual rebirth happened after a short stint in Iran and not in the glittering corridors of European football ought to shut down the smug elite who tell us faith is a private, outdated relic.
Kakuta’s career has been a globe-trotting odyssey — a young star at Chelsea, spells across Europe and Asia, and a brief contract in Iran before moving on to Turkey’s Sakaryaspor this year. His willingness to go where others wouldn’t, and to admit raw vulnerability publicly, is a rebuke to a culture that prizes success and silence over humility and truth.
Let’s be clear about what makes this testimony striking: Iran is not some casual vacation spot for spiritual retreats. It is a regime that criminalizes conversions from Islam and subjects converts to surveillance, imprisonment and brutal sentences. For a man to find Jesus there — and then to baptize publicly upon returning — is a courageous act that ought to be lauded by every defender of religious liberty.
Americans and Christians should take heart and learn from Kakuta’s witness: faith transforms, and it often arrives in the most unexpected places. If the left’s cultural mandarins care so little for faith-based courage, conservatives will stand taller and louder in praise of men who trade the empty applause of the stadium for the eternal applause of heaven. Support religious freedom, pray for persecuted believers, and celebrate a soul rescued from darkness — that is the true victory.
