On May 22 2017, Martin Hibbert was in an Italian restaurant on King Street West in Manchester. He looked across at his teenage daughter, Eve, in the first year of her GCSEs. She smiles shyly, glass raised, brown hair fanning across her shoulders. “She had a bit of make-up on and she looked beautiful,” Hibbert remembers. “She always did. But I remember just thinking, ‘She’s not my little girl any more — she’s a woman’. I got one of the waiters to take a picture of us, and it’s obviously quite infamous now. The last picture. You know, before. That’s why everybody knew we were at the concert.”
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What unfolds over the next few hours is the reason Hibbert now has a complete spinal cord injury at T10 — in other words, he is paralysed from the waist down — and Eve has a significant, life-altering brain injury. It is the reason why Ariana Grande has a tattoo of a bee, wings swooping into a heart, behind her left ear. It is the reason why the wall near the Long Millgate entrance at Manchester Victoria station is always decorated with cards, letters, flowers and drawings, particularly at this time of year.
Quick pit stop with Eve before Miss Grande at the Arena, reads the caption on Martin’s Facebook post.
Beneath it, the comments chronicle the night’s descent into an evening of unimaginable horror.
Lovely picture x, reads the first, from when all was well.
Then there is a second — Hope you’re all home safe — from the hours when those of us still awake knew that something had happened but no one was quite sure what.
Then the urgency increases.
Has anyone heard from Martin yet? Sent him a text this morning when I found out and have asked him to confirm he’s safe on Facebook, but still no word.
Likewise. I’ve WhatsApped him but had no reply. It’s showing as one tick as if it’s not been received.
Surely friends or work colleagues are seeing all this and one could reply and say something.
Thinking and praying you are both safe.
Hibbert had a friend who operates the VIP boxes at the Manchester Arena. He and Eve “did a lot of concerts together and she has me wrapped around her little finger”: the tickets to see Grande that Monday had been a Christmas surprise. “I was getting a bit of a grief from her mum because it was a school night and Eve was doing mock exams the following month,” Hibbert says. That was why they had planned to leave during the encore, and “make a run for it so I could get her home, in bed and up early for school the next day. I think that’s what saved our lives: if we’d not been running, we would have been in the blast zone and we definitely would have been dead.”
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In the next window of our Zoom call is Courtney Sweetman-Kirk, the Sheffield United Women forward and a rising reporter winning acclaim for her work on Sky Sports.
She is joining us because Hibbert is a women’s football agent, and she is not only among his biggest success stories but — and she does not know this yet — the reason he persisted in that career at all when he feared, facing a lifetime in a wheelchair, he would not be able to drive to grounds or network as easily. The conversation is as salutary as it is grim and Hibbert wants to speak today, a fortnight before Christmas, to remind others that there are still avenues open to them in football even when life throws up unthinkable tragedy.
“I remember liking that photo of Eve,” Sweetman-Kirk says. “And then I saw the news flash up on my phone and Sky News. You just have that sinking feeling. I sent him a message because you initially just thought, ‘It’s going to be pandemonium getting out of there, and I’m sure he’s fine but just caught up in it all’. The longer time goes on, the more you’re looking at Twitter, which is probably one of the worst things you can do. There was a video: someone in a car, a few streets away, waiting to pick someone up. It was of what might be called the blast. It said initially it was pyrotechnics. I watched that and I’m thinking, ‘That’s not pyrotechnics’. Like everyone connected to that night, I didn’t sleep particularly well.”
Sweetman-Kirk woke up and found Hibbert’s wife, Gabby, on social media. “She said: ‘We’ve found Martin. He is in a bad way, but he’s alive.’”
Hibbert was the closest person to the bomb to survive when it was detonated by Salman Ramadan Abedi.
He and Eve fell two feet from the blast zone, 10 metres from the bomb. The police liaison officer has since told Hibbert that he had actually brushed shoulders with Abedi: Hibbert has seen CCTV footage from “about three seconds before”, in which he and Eve are not even in Abedi’s vicinity, “which just shows how quickly it happens”. The improvised explosive device, filled with nuts and bolts to act as shrapnel, went off at 22:31.
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Hibbert remembers it with alarming, forensic clarity. What happened next is the source of the post-traumatic stress disorder that flares up if he is having a bad day. If he wakes up during the night, “that’s what I get taken to”. He says that the sound is just like it is in war movies: a flash, a high-pitched ring, shrill like an alarm, the world fading behind it. He lay on a floor littered with body parts, seeing others’ limbs and organs blasted apart. He was double-checking himself constantly. “I just knew — I knew — something bad happened. I see Eve in a bad way and I’m in a pool of blood. I know I’m dying, basically.”
His words are sharp with their frankness but it is difficult to know if there is any other way to tell this story.
Hibbert is never overcome with emotion and recites the extent of his injuries as though he himself cannot quite believe that he is still alive. Twenty-two bolts had shot through his body. One had flown into Hibbert’s neck, severing two arteries. Another jammed in his backbone, slicing part of the spinal cord. His body was almost empty of blood by the time they got him to hospital an hour later. A yellow-jacketed security guard, Chris Miley, stemmed the bleeding from Hibbert’s neck with an Ariana Grande T-shirt from a memorabilia stall — the inquiry has since found the majority of casualties were carried out on makeshift stretchers and that there were limited first aid supplies at the neighbouring National Football Museum. Eve was across from him “and I could see that she was slipping away. And I knew I was, as well. At that point, I didn’t think I was going to make it”.
Miley kept up an incessant stream of conversation to keep Hibbert awake and conscious.
“I wasn’t in any pain,” Hibbert says. “I wasn’t scared. I was very calm, and that’s why I can remember. I was saying, ‘Tell me wife I love her’. My whole focus was to make sure Eve gets out, so hopefully she gets in an ambulance and survives. That’s all that was going through my mind.” A paramedic came to take Hibbert in an ambulance and he asked them to take Eve instead, “and that starts when the curtains come down and I think, ‘That’s my time’.”
Are you able to process and understand that, that your own death is imminent? “Yeah,” he says, quietly. “To just have that 45 minutes to an hour, making peace with yourself, saying bye to everybody, to think that you’re not going to be here anymore.”
Hibbert jokes that he sometimes feels “like an F1 car”, because of the extensive “pit team” that saved his life. Those are the moments of his story in which you are reminded of the extraordinary capacity of the best of us in times most would find too devastating to bear.
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There was the paramedic, Paul Harvey, who had been instructed to drive Hibbert to a hospital 45 minutes away but ignored that and rerouted to the far nearer Salford Royal. Ankur Saxena, the consultant neurosurgeon who performed Hibbert’s initial 14-hour surgery, was driving home from a 12-hour shift when he heard the news on the radio and returned to the hospital. Had he not done so, Hibbert would almost certainly be dead: another surgeon had earlier refused to operate on him because they thought he would die on the table.
The initial plan had been to run a rod through Hibbert’s back and neck. Instead, Saxena dove into the spine and pulled out each piece of shrapnel and each piece of shattered spinal cord one by one. Hibbert likens it to the board game Operation, although the risks were not of a buzz and a cheap bulb flashing behind a red nose but of severe damage to his spine and perhaps even death.

Hibbert wasn’t identified until 4am, during which time wife Gabriella, he says, feared he had “been blown to smithereens”. She, Hibbert’s two brothers and his mother were dialling the helpline constantly. In the end, the policeman who was looking after Eve at Manchester Children’s Hospital — and this is another reminder of humanity’s capacity for compassion in times of crisis — promised Gabriella that he would try to find her husband.
When questioned by hospital staff, Hibbert, returning from the fog of heavy drugs, had been unable to give his name or address. But he reiterated, over and over, that he was a Jedi Knight — for years this had been his default answer, not being religious, when people had asked him in the past for his beliefs. That, coupled with Hibbert’s tattoos, was how he was reunited with his family.
“My wife says that that gave her a lot of relief, because you can imagine the state I was in: tubes and wires. She knew that I was still there.” His mother insists to this day that being told Hibbert would be paralysed if he pulled through was the worst thing she has ever heard. “I sometimes think they’ve been affected more than I have,” he says. “We’ve only really spoken about it as a family once. I want to talk about it because I want to know what happened. For my brothers, they don’t like talking about it because they thought they’d lost their big brother.”
Hospitals began summoning surgeons from the army, because those closest to the bomb suffered injuries akin to those found only in war zones. Eve’s type of brain injury is so rare there are academic papers written on how she pulled through — it is believed she is the only person in the world to survive it — and a surgeon later confessed to Hibbert that if anyone had sustained that on the battlefield “they would have just left them”. When Hibbert flew to Australia for rehabilitation, 12 months on from the bombing, Eve began talking and eating properly. “She’s suffered a catastrophic brain aneurysm that’s never going to heal itself and there’s going to be long-term care needed,” Hibbert says, “but she’s still there. We say, a bit like me, it’s Eve Mk 2. She’s doing well, really well.”
In the month after Hibbert’s surgery, as he returned to lucidity, he was sure he was dying. When Gabriella sat at his bedside compiling a list of visitors, he mistakenly asked if this was for his funeral. He knew, however, that they were keeping something from him. He likens himself to a child on Christmas Eve, scooping up presents and shaking them to try to find out what’s inside, searching for answers. They knew they could not keep the truth from him forever: a follower of the Paralympics, Hibbert recognised the term “T10” and was told he would not walk again.
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He responded with a pragmatism that has defined his recovery. “I think they were expecting me, as probably most people would, to kick off and cry,” he says. “But it was a case of, ‘Right — what do we do now? Let’s get on with it’. And that’s been the attitude ever since. Even in the worst times, there’s always opportunities. Going through what I’ve been through, I don’t think many people would argue if I did just want to sit in a corner and cry about it, but I’ve not been brought up like that. And I’ve never been like that. You can either sit and complain about it, or you get up and do something about it. And I’ve always done the latter.”
His arms were peppered with golf ball-sized shrapnel wounds and holes, and he was unable to move his hands or make thumb and index finger meet. The move from intensive care to high dependency, then from high dependency to major trauma, marked the commencement of physiotherapy, and inching through key milestones: moving his fingers, his hands, sitting up, sitting in a chair. He lost a stone in a month — “my arms are like sticks and I’ve got bandages everywhere, but I never quit”. His dedication was such that his physiotherapists often had to pull him off the exercise machines. But his motivation was Eve, whose bedside he was hankering to sit at.
“I remember, quite early on, the doctors saying to me, ‘I know it’s hard, but you’ve got to concentrate on yourself. You’ve got to get better’. I didn’t take too kindly to that, telling me to not think about Eve. I think that’s what got me through. People with my injury are normally in the spinal unit for anything from six to 12 months. I was out in three.”
The speed of that section of Hibbert’s recovery risks glossing over the extent of his mental injuries and he adds that acceptance did not come immediately.
Months before the attack, Hibbert — a former private banker dealing with Premier League footballers at Manchester United, Liverpool and Manchester City — quit his job to work full-time at Synergy Sports Management, the agency he had established in 2015 after seeing how often players fell victim to bad advice and wondering if there was a way he could prevent it. From his hospital bed, he reflected on the fact he would not be able to walk his dog, play football, or be an agent. The turning point came that September when he transferred Sweetman-Kirk from Doncaster Belles to Everton from a bed in a spinal injuries centre in Southport, away from the watchful eyes of nurses instructing him to put down the phone.
“The people in there are all either Liverpool fans or Everton fans. At the last minute, Liverpool came in for her. All the guys on my ward were like, ‘What’s happening with Courtney, Martin? Everton were in for her last night!’ Then the nurses would come in and say, ‘You’d better not be on that phone, Martin’. And then they go and I’d be like…” he makes the phone gesture with his hand, fist clenched, thumb and pinkie outstretched, and mimes sealing the deal. “I wasn’t one of these people that could just lie in bed. My mind is the same as it was pre-injury, but my body isn’t.
“But that transfer gave me…” he pauses. “I knew life wasn’t going to be the same, but I thought, ‘Actually, I have a good relationship with the players’. I knew they’d all stand by me. And at that point, there wasn’t really a lot of agents in the (women’s) game — like, good agents. I had a good reputation. All the managers knew me, and they were coming to visit me and ringing me anyway.
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“That’s when I thought, ‘I think I can do this’. I might not be able to run around and do what I was doing before — I’d go watch Courtney play, then get back home at midnight, then be off again at six in the morning — but that transfer (made me think), ‘You might have to do things a bit differently, but you can still do this’. It’ll be a bit difficult, but it’s my passion. It was what I’d lived for. And I wasn’t going to let anybody take that away.”
He pauses, glances at Sweetman-Kirk in the other half of the screen. “I don’t know if I’ve ever told that story before. Did you know that, Courtney?”
“I didn’t,” she smiles. They both laugh — big, rollicking belly-laughs, so cathartic after the bleakness of the earlier conversation. “That’s really cool. That might have been that initial spark at that time, but he is such a determined guy. If he can’t smash through, he’ll go round, over, under. It’s infectious. When women’s football was not that professional, there were a lot of agents that were just (after) the agent’s fee or the five per cent of your salary. He tries to do things in the right way. And in women’s football, and football in general, that’s not an easy thing to come by.”
The pair have grown closer since that night at the arena — Sweetman-Kirk was the player who contacted Hibbert’s other clients the following day, and the video she sent to him in hospital is his favourite, even above messages from David Beckham and Sir Alex Ferguson. They first met in January 2016, just over a year before the attack, and Hibbert would drive Eve to witness Sweetman-Kirk’s rehabilitation sessions for a significant injury at Leeds Beckett University because “being a female professional footballer and the battles she’s faced in doing that is inspirational, and Eve was at an age where I wanted her to look up to people like Courtney — inspirational women, strong women”. Eve once helped him compile the paperwork for a signing and Hibbert and Gabriella will record Sweetman-Kirk’s Sky Sports appearances.
Pre-pandemic, Hibbert was visiting Australia for months at a time for revolutionary treatment. He regained some movement in his legs and was able to stand to kiss Gabriella, the result of gruelling, demanding work: “one of the days, I was so exhausted I slept for 17 hours”. COVID-19 has halted that aspect of his recovery and he fears that he has “gone backwards a bit” in terms of his rehab, but he no longer needs to take medication, for either his spine or his PTSD and depression.
Australian actor Chris Hemsworth, who met Hibbert in Australia, has promised the pair can walk the red carpet together if Hibbert can walk in time for the Thor: Love And Thunder premiere in 2022. He completed the 10k Great Manchester Run in a racing wheelchair in 2018 and during lockdown in May he handcycled 66 miles in his living room to raise money for the Spinal Injuries Association.
The one and only @chrishemsworth pic.twitter.com/x5tylzcshM
— Martin Hibbert ♿️ (@MartinHibbert) December 12, 2020
All the while, his agency is thriving.
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“I’m never going to be a millionaire out of it, but I wouldn’t change it for the world,” he says. “The people that you meet, the relationships that you have — we’ll do it together.
“Courtney is a client first and foremost, but she’s a very close friend. She’s like family. The journey we’ve been on, what she’s achieved — I’m proud to have a part to play, and that is a very special thing for me to hold.”
Sweetman-Kirk adds: “For Martin to be doing those things defies what you think is possible. As with every footballer, it’s your life, but sometimes it’s too much, and it can consume me to a point where it’s not healthy. Having that realisation that anything can be taken away from you at any second probably made me appreciate all the things outside of my life, outside of football.
“If you’re around him for a prolonged period of time, it’s difficult not to be influenced by the way he looks at life.”
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