First Touch ’26 - Cape Verde

First Touch | World Soccer · Dec 12, 2025 · 11m

To find Cape Verde on a map, you have to keep zooming in. This is what the football world has had to do to understand: how the tiny Atlantic archipelago became a World Cup nation.

In this World Cup Capsule, David Gass traces the Blue Sharks’ rise from post-independence minnows to AFCON regulars and, finally, first-time World Cup qualifiers. We explore how a country of just over half a million people used its vast diaspora—stretching from Portugal and Rotterdam to New England and Ireland—to build a competitive squad, recruiting players on LinkedIn and in lower European leagues while investing…