Cape Verde has qualified for the World Cup for the first time in their history.
Their squad includes a Dublin-born centre-back who nearly deleted the message that changed his life. This is what football looks like when a half-million people decide to believe.
On October 13, 2025, Cape Verde beat Eswatini 3-0 in Praia, qualifying for the World Cup for the first time in their history. Somewhere in the stadium, Roberto Lopes, born in Dublin, raised in Crumlin, was a Shamrock Rovers defender.
His entire career was on the pitch. He had a flight to catch. His wife was due to give birth.
Lopes became, in that moment, the first League of Ireland player ever to qualify for the World Cup.
He also became the clearest embodiment of what Cape Verde’s football story actually is, not a tale of infrastructure or federation investment or tactical evolution. However, those things matter, but a story about a diaspora scattered across Europe who found each other through football and built something that nobody in the archipelago had seen before.
The ten islands of Cape Verde have a combined population of around 580,000. They will send a team to the 2026 World Cup in the United States.
Only Iceland, when it qualified in 2018, has done it from a smaller population. The Blue Sharks are going to America, and the man who helped get them there nearly deleted the message that started everything.
“Cape Verde’s qualifying group contained Cameroon. They finished four points clear. Their centre-back rushed to the airport immediately after the final whistle. His wife was in labour.”
The Message He Almost Deleted
In 2018, the then-Cape Verde head coach Rui Águas sent a message on LinkedIn to a League of Ireland defender he had identified as eligible through his father. The message was in Portuguese. Roberto Lopes does not speak Portuguese. He assumed it was spam and ignored it.
Nine months later, Águas messaged again, this time in English. Lopes copied the first message into Google Translate and read its translation. The coach asked whether he had considered playing for Cape Verde. Lopes replied immediately. He felt, he said later, rude for not having replied sooner.
His father, Carlos, had left Cape Verde at 16 to work as a chef on international transport ships, eventually settling in Dublin.
Roberto had grown up in Crumlin, played for Bohemian FC, moved to Shamrock Rovers, won four successive League of Ireland titles, and been named in the PFA Ireland team of the year. He had represented Ireland at the under-19 level and assumed his international football ended there.
Then, a message in a language he didn’t understand arrived in a LinkedIn inbox he barely used, and everything changed.
When Cape Verde sealed qualification against Eswatini, Lopes was in the starting eleven. Carlos was in the stands. After the final whistle, Lopes rushed to the airport. His wife, Leah, was expecting their first child back in Dublin. He made it in time.
“I’m probably the luckiest person in the world,” he said afterwards. It is hard to argue with him.
How a Country of 580,000 Built a World Cup Team
The Cape Verdean Football Federation was founded in 1982 and joined FIFA in 1986.
The islands’ best footballers have almost always left — to Portugal, the Netherlands, France, Italy — following the same diaspora routes as their families.
What coach Bubista, who has been in charge since 2020, has done is turn that diaspora into a systematic recruitment operation rather than a patchwork of available players.
The squad that qualified for 2026 is drawn from Portuguese, Dutch, and French leagues, with Lopes the outlier arriving from Ireland. Ryan Mendes, Cape Verde’s all-time leading scorer and caps leader, spent his career at Le Havre, Lille and Nottingham Forest.
Willy Semedo plays in Portugal. Stopira, the veteran defender, has been the defensive anchor for a decade. Dailon Livramento, born in the Netherlands, scored the winner against Cameroon in qualifying — the result that gave Cape Verde control of their group.
The qualifying campaign itself was harder than the final table suggests. Cape Verde drew 3-3 in Libya in a match that looked set to derail everything, needing a dramatic late equaliser to keep their fate in their own hands.
They went into the final matchday knowing a win over Eswatini would be enough — regardless of what Cameroon did. They won 3-0. Cameroon, despite beating Angola, finished four points behind.
Cape Verde’s AFCON record — quarter-finals in 2013 and 2023 — had signalled that something was building. The World Cup qualification is the confirmation.
CAF GROUP D QUALIFYING — CAPE VERDE
P10 W7 D2 L1 GD +8 Finished 4 points clear of Cameroon.
First World Cup appearance in the nation’s history. Roberto Lopes: First League of Ireland player ever to qualify for the World Cup.
Second-smallest nation by population to qualify, behind Iceland in 2018.
Group H: Spain, Uruguay, Saudi Arabia
Cape Verde were drawn in Group H alongside Spain, Uruguay, and Saudi Arabia. It is the hardest possible context for a debut. Spain is the reigning European champion.
Uruguay have reached the World Cup semi-finals twice in the last fifteen years. Saudi Arabia beat Argentina in the 2022 group stage.
Nobody expects Cape Verde to advance. That is, in its own way, exactly the position they have occupied at every tournament they have entered — the side nobody expects, the team built from diaspora connections and a LinkedIn message and a father who left an island at sixteen and ended up in Dublin.
They have exceeded expectations before. The quarter-final run at the 2023 AFCON, where they beat Morocco’s conquerors and pushed Senegal to a penalty shootout, is evidence of what Bubista’s system can do against sides ranked far above them.
Cape Verde will play against Spain on June 15 in Atlanta. Spain has won the World Cup once and the European Championship (Euros) four times. Cape Verde has never played at a World Cup before. The gap in pedigree is as wide as the Atlantic between the two nations.
But Roberto Lopes nearly deleted the message that started all of this, and here he is anyway.
Cape Verde’s population is 580,000. Their squad is scattered across Europe. Their captain spent his whole career in the League of Ireland. In June 2026, they will play Spain in Atlanta at the world’s biggest tournament.
Some stories do not need embellishment. They just need to be told.
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Source: www.myjoyonline.com
