There’s not an obvious connection between heart disease and managing a national football team, but for 58-year-old Invernessian Duncan MacAulay, the path was a natural one, and it’s all thanks to his organ donor.

Back in 2019, Duncan, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, Operational Comms Manager, collapsed while running in Strathclyde Country Park. On his return home to Inverness he saw his GP who immediately admitted him to Raigmore, where he was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy.

After trials with medication, a defibrillator was fitted into Duncan’s left shoulder. It didn’t prevent his heart from regularly stopping but would shock him back into life when it did. As the ‘stops and shocks’ became ever more frequent and alarming (not for Duncan, but for those around him) there was no option but to find him a donor heart.

“I was at home in Inshes in February 2023 when I got the call from The Golden Jubilee saying they had a new heart for me”, he explains. Remarkably, within ten days of his operation, he was back at home in Inverness.
With twin goals of honouring the anonymous donor who had lost their life, and of making the most of the new opportunities his new heart has given him, Duncan set out to get back to fitness as quickly as possible.

“I started with long walks, but wanted to do more for my heart, so I joined the gym, and I now go there every morning before work”, he says.
But what is it like to get this second chance of life?

“My new heart has made a phenomenal difference to my life,” he says. “My wife and family don’t need to worry any more about me collapsing and having to be shocked back into life. I feel like the luckiest man on earth”.

And he explains his gratitude, “I was lucky to be the right blood group, weight, and height, when this particular heart became available. And most of all lucky that my donor family said yes to transplant.

“I felt that I really needed to do something positive with this new lease of life to honour my donor and their family, and to raise awareness of the organ donation programme so that others might get the same gift that I received. But what?”

Duncan’s love of sport meant his interest was piqued when he heard about the inaugural World Transplant Football Cup, which took place in Cervia in Italy in September 2024.

“I looked into it,” he said, “hoping to be able to support my home nation, but I was shocked to discover that Scotland was the only home nation not represented. I needed to fix that!”
Duncan contacted Transplant Sport, a charity who seek to keep transplant recipients fit and active and raise awareness of the impact of organ donation. They do everything Duncan himself felt drawn to doing after his own transplant.

Within a short time, Duncan had created the first ever Scottish National Transplant Football Team. And with very little time to train together, they competed in the Euros in Oxford this April, acquitting themselves rather well, with 8-1 win over Ireland, a 4-4 draw with the runners up from the 2024 World Cup, and narrowly 4-3 lost to eventual finalists Italy.

The aim is now to strengthen and expand the mixed gender team, and build a support network so that Scotland can at to compete in the next Transplant Football World Cup in 2026.

To do that, Duncan, as team manager, needs to raise funds for training facilities, kit, and education programmes, and he hopes to develop a number of regional Transplant Football Teams in all areas of Scotland, and, in the future, expand into other sports. The search is on to bring in an army of volunteers to give financial, legal, fundraising, and nutritional guidance, and physio support too, to guard against injuries.

The energy Duncan has to give back in honour of the donor who gave so much to him, is outstanding, and a demonstration of the impact organ donation has had on his life.
So, alongside his sterling efforts with the football team, he urges everyone to get themselves informed about organ donation and decide whether they’d like to become a donor themselves.

And he urges us all to then share that decision with our families.

“Don’t give your family a really difficult decision to make,” he stresses. “Make that decision and share it with them, so if the worst happens to you, they know what to do.”
And at that he is back to the gym, back to the day job, and back to giving all Scots, whether touched by organ donation or not, a reason to follow their national team at the Transplant World Cup – for the first time in history.