Antoine Semenyo's route from non-league football to the World Cup is not a neat one, but it is easy to trace. His first senior start came in front of fewer than 400 people. At Bath City, he scored a hat-trick on his first men's start in the Somerset Premier Cup tie against Welton Rovers, then finished with 6 goals in 9 appearances. He has now made a World Cup appearance for Ghana, with 51 minutes already on the board.

Jerry Gill saw the breakthrough quickly

Jerry Gill does not dress it up. "I threw him in and he scored a hat-trick and that was the trigger really," the Bath City manager said. "We gave him an opportunity, and the rest is history. He was feared by a lot of defences and made a massive contribution."

Gill also remembered the detail that stood out most, when Semenyo bumped a six-foot-two centre-back to the ground and finished into the bottom corner. "That was the moment where I thought 'yeah, this boy has got something special'," he said.

Semenyo's own account backs up the physical side of that step. "When I went to Bath, players are playing for mortgages, they need to pay bills and they need wins. It was tough at the start, I was getting red carded, pushed around, elbows flying. Gradually I got used to it and started performing."

That loan spell has aged well as a reference point. It was not glamorous, but it gave Antoine Semenyo a first real taste of men's football, and the numbers from that spell are hard to ignore: 6 in 9, starting from a crowd of fewer than 400.

Bristol City were part of the pathway too, with Semenyo training there by day and with Bath City on Tuesday and Thursday nights. The bigger point is that the jump from that routine to a World Cup bench and minutes for Ghana was built on a player who adapted quickly once the football got rougher.

The Ghana stage is still early, so nobody should pretend this is a finished story. But the same edge Gill spotted at Bath City is now showing up at international level, and Semenyo has already turned that low-level loan into the kind of origin story managers remember.

Written by Sam Whitfield with AI-assisted research, cross-checked against 1 outlet. How we work →