Read 12 year old Mikey Poulli's story

Mikey was born fully sighted in 2010, but following a routine eye test when he was six years old, they noticed a problem with the retina in both eyes. After a few months of further testing at Moorfields Eye Hospital, he was diagnosed with rod-cone dystrophy.

This diagnosis was a huge shock and I didn’t believe what the doctors were telling me, because Mikey was still fully sighted and doing all of the usual activities at school. He was still reading books with small text, taking part in PE and his football club. We didn’t quite know how his sight condition would manifest - if it would stabilise or continue to deteriorate, the doctors couldn’t tell us. But a year on from that diagnosis, he was completely blind.

Mikey started secondary school this year and since his TA’s been in place, making sure that his work is accessible, he’s been doing really well.

Being so young when he lost his sight, Mikey couldn’t really articulate his feelings to us, he just took everything in his stride. His biggest concern was that he might not able to play football anymore.

He used to play football before he lost his vision, and was one of the better players at the club. And he just carried on playing football, even through his vision loss. He really wanted to play football all the time, every day. So, we were trying to find balls with bells in them so he could carry on playing.

When Mikey lost his vision, he had to stop playing at the club, as it was dangerous for him and the other kids. We soon found a place that’s a centre of excellence at Tottenham Hotspurs, where they do specialist training for disabled children, and have the right equipment and set-up.

Mikey instinctively adapted his style of playing football whilst he was losing his vision. He just took that upon himself and realised that he can carry on; thinking logically about where the ball is, how to dribble and shoot it. That’s why they were so shocked at the centre of excellence, because he hadn’t yet trained professionally, he was so young, but he was able to play football so naturally. That’s when he got scouted to play for England.

He receives one-to-one coaching with a professional coach, funded by the FA and he’s improving every week. Then once every two weeks, he trains with the England hub with other players.

Mikey’s the youngest to be scouted to play for England, he doesn’t enter the England first team until he is 13. At the moment they just want to focus on developing his ability as much as possible, so that he’s training with England.

He trains one-to-one mostly, as it’s quite dangerous to have young blind people running around, you can have a lot of accidents. The aim is that he’ll develop and grow stronger, then be able to take part in more group activities.

Mikey’s been recognised a lot on social media and he’s been on the news, about how well he’s adapted and improved so well, being so young. He’s still going from strength to strength. That passion for football has stayed with him.

Mikey’s very much into gaming now. Blind gamers from across the world, they log on and play together. And because of the gaming side, he’s really interested in developing and coding. He’s started to practice developing with other blind gamers and is in the process of programming his own game at the moment, and getting different sounds.

Mikey’s love for football has been a welcome distraction from him losing his sight. At the time Mikey losing his sight was just heart-wrenching, we were heartbroken. So, the football coming about so quickly after he went blind - it helped to take our minds off the serious reality of the situation, as we focussed on the social media and TV stuff.

It’s just great that he’s got something that he can focus on and knowing that there’s potentially a great opportunity here to do something amazing for his country that he will get recognised for. Also, for anyone else who is vision impaired, has a disability or even mentally that they’re not good enough to be able to do it - they can look at Mikey and be like, wow, I can do it.

You just don’t know what can be unlocked in someone with a little bit of support. They may have an amazing ability that you’d never be aware of and they can be huge inspiration to many people. When Mikey was going blind, he would carry on telling me that he wants to be a footballer, but I wouldn’t believe it could happen - because I didn’t even know how that would work, someone blind playing football.

So, I think that there’s the right support there for everybody - not just visually impaired children, but anybody who needs assistance. It’s very important that everyone is given the same chance to achieve something in life.”