Tragedy Strikes Thai Football: Lightning Kills Yala FC Player

On a rain-lashed night in southern Thailand, a regional cup tie turned in an instant from routine contest to unthinkable tragedy.

At Santiphap Stadium in the Su-ngai Kolok district of Narathiwat province, 24-year-old winger Safwan Awae, newly signed by Thai League 3 side Yala FC, was struck by lightning mid-match during a Golok Cup fixture and later died from his injuries.

A dream realised, then ripped away

Awae had put pen to paper with Yala FC only a week earlier. Local reports spoke of a lifelong ambition finally realised, a young winger stepping into the professional ranks with the club he had long wanted to represent.

He barely had time to wear the shirt.

On Tuesday, August 5, 2026, under heavy monsoon skies, the Golok Cup tie pushed on despite deteriorating conditions. The rain thickened, the pitch glistened, and still the game continued, players cutting through sheets of water as spectators huddled under whatever cover they could find.

Then the storm answered.

A single flash. A crack that silenced the stadium. The bolt hit the pitch and dropped Awae where he stood.

Chaos on the pitch

For a few stunned seconds, nobody moved. Then the panic surged.

Footage from the ground shows players from both sides sprinting towards Awae, waving frantically for help. Spectators vaulted barriers and rushed onto the sodden turf. Some tried to shield him from the driving rain with jackets and umbrellas; others attempted to revive him as the storm rumbled overhead.

Twelve other players were also caught in the strike zone, suffering burns of varying severity. Among them was 22-year-old Malaysian footballer Alif Ezzahan Zulkifli, one of several players taken to nearby Sungai Kolok Hospital for treatment.

Sirens eventually cut through the noise of the downpour. Emergency services reached the scene and transported Awae to hospital in critical condition. Despite their efforts, he did not survive. Local police chief Thun Sirikhunt later confirmed that the winger had died from his injuries.

A regional tournament, the Golok Cup, had become the site of one of the most shocking incidents Thai football has seen in recent years.

Grief in Yala and beyond

The timing makes the loss even harder to absorb. Awae had just arrived, just stepped into the dressing room, just begun to live the reality he had chased for years. Teammates barely had time to know him as a colleague before they were left to mourn him.

“He never got the chance to build on that milestone,” the club acknowledged in the aftermath.

Yala FC released a statement on their official page, expressing deep condolences to Awae’s family and those closest to him. The message carried the weight of a club trying to process not only the loss of a player, but the sudden absence of a young man whose career had only just started.

The Football Association of Thailand (FAT) followed with a formal response of its own, saying it “shares the grief with the family, friends and the club during this difficult time.” The words underlined how far the shock had travelled, from a regional stadium near the Malaysian border to the corridors of the national game.

A wider shadow over the grassroots game

The lightning strike in Narathiwat arrives against a bleak backdrop of recent tragedies in grassroots and lower-tier football.

In a separate incident reported by TUKO.co.ke, Brazilian teenager Micael Leandro da Silva was shot dead shortly after finishing an amateur football tournament in Maceio. His father’s stark description of a family “torn apart” by two attackers underscored how fragile the game’s most hopeful stages can be.

From a monsoon-soaked pitch in Thailand to a community tournament in Brazil, two young footballers, both chasing the simplest of dreams — to play, to compete, to move up one step at a time — will not kick a ball again.

For Yala FC, for the players who stood on that waterlogged turf as the sky split open, and for a family who had just watched a son reach his goal, the question now is a brutal one: how do you carry on when the moment you waited for becomes the moment everything stops?