Dominic Johns' Journey: From Injury to Captaincy at Soccer Sevens

Two years ago, Dominic Johns stood on the touchline at the HKFC Standard Chartered Soccer Sevens with his leg in pieces and his future in doubt.

He had just watched his right tibia and fibula snapped by a tackle from North District’s Ho Chun-ho, an impact that turned a lively, sharp forward for Football Club into a reluctant spectator. The break was bad. What followed was worse.

The first surgery failed. A metal rod went into the leg, but the problems did not stop there. When doctors went back in to remove the rod and explore what else was going wrong, Johns’ recovery veered into a nightmare. An infection set in. His leg, as he puts it, was “hanging floppy”. For three or four months he lived on antibiotics, with pain, uncertainty and the grim feeling that nothing was moving in the right direction.

By November 2024 he was in Sydney for another operation, a procedure that finally gave him a path forward, but not a simple one. The road back was long, uneven and, at times, brutally lonely.

“It’s third time lucky,” he says now, preparing to captain Football Club at this weekend’s sevens. The words carry more weight than a throwaway cliché.

For most of the first 18 months, he could not even map out a proper rehabilitation plan. Every time he thought he understood the next step, something changed. A setback. A new issue. Another delay.

What looked from the outside like a broken leg became, for Johns, something much heavier: “a pretty big mental struggle” that stretched over two years. The physical damage was obvious. The psychological toll ran deeper. He went from being a nippy, resourceful forward to someone who could not trust his own body, never mind a tackle.

Two years on from that day as a frustrated, uncomfortable onlooker at the Sevens, he returns to the same tournament transformed. Last year he was working behind the scenes, producing digital content for the 2025 edition. This year he walks out as captain of Football Club, the story flipped on its head.

The journey still refused to smooth out. Early this season, in what should have been a routine friendly, Johns took another blow. It hurt physically. It cut even more sharply in his mind. After everything he had endured, any knock felt like a threat, a reminder of how fragile progress could be.

Yet here he is, back at the HKFC Standard Chartered Soccer Sevens, no longer the man with his leg in a mess on the sidelines, but the one leading his side out. The scars remain, but so does the armband.