He cut inside from the left, opened his body, and curled it into the far top corner. Cape Verde 2, Argentina 2, in the 103rd minute of a tie bookmakers had given Cape Verde as little as a 4 percent chance of winning outright. Sidny Lopes Cabral had just scored the greatest goal in Cape Verdean football history. He didn’t stay to admire it, running straight into the crowd to find his girlfriend before turning back for the pitch. Argentina won it in extra time, 3-2, in a match that never once behaved like a mismatch. But long after the scoreline fades, people will remember the goal, and that run into the stands.
Two players stood at either end of that Cape Verde back line, and between them they told the whole story of what this team is. Cabral is 23, born in Rotterdam, one of seven squad members born in the Dutch city, more than were born in the island nation’s own capital, Praia. His parents left Santiago for the Netherlands at seventeen and met there. At the other end stood Vozinha, 40, who spent the tournament saving shots from Messi and Spain and became a global name doing it. His contract with Chaves, in Portugal’s second division, expired on June 1. He walked out of Hard Rock Stadium with no club to return to, weeks after his teammate’s value had risen by ten million euros in a move to Trabzonspor. Cape Verde does not offer its players one story. It offers several, side by side, on the same pitch.
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Cabral’s version nearly didn’t survive its early chapters. The football started at Twente’s academy, then Helsingborg in Sweden, before a signing that looked like the end of something rather than the start: Rot-Weiss Erfurt, Germany’s fifth tier, in February 2022. “There was nothing at the club,” he told Maisfutebol. “It was shorts, a thermal shirt, and a rain cape. Nothing else. We trained on a small artificial pitch, very hard. It was a real battle.” He earned the equivalent of £850 a month there, using bin bags as curtains and training in shorts through a cold German winter. Erfurt won promotion. Viktoria Köln came next, then Portugal, where he joined Estrela da Amadora and then Benfica.
“My career is a crazy story,” he told A Bola after signing. “I’m proud I never gave up and always believed in myself. When I was on the bench in Germany’s fifth division, I never imagined I’d reach Benfica.” In June, Benfica sold him to Trabzonspor for ten million euros, weeks before this World Cup.
Sidny Lopes Cabral scored a 103-minute equaliser for Cape Verde against Argentina. (AP)
He was racially abused by fans during matches in Germany. It happened again, differently, months later at Benfica. After teammate Gianluca Prestianni was accused by Real Madrid’s Vinícius Júnior of racially abusing him during the first leg, a charge UEFA provisionally suspended Prestianni over while it investigated, Cabral approached Vinícius after the return leg and asked to swap shirts, a gesture of admiration for a player he has long followed. Vinícius agreed, pointing toward the tunnel, but the two never crossed paths again, and the swap never happened. Portuguese outlets including A Bola, O Jogo, and Maisfutebol reported Cabral had second thoughts, worried it would look like a betrayal of Prestianni amid the investigation, and cleared the matter up with Benfica’s staff. It didn’t spare him the backlash. Supporters flooded his Instagram with hostile comments, some calling for him to leave the club, and Prestianni was seen liking a post criticising him. Cabral told the Guardian the messages had turned racist. “I had to turn off my phone,” he said. “It’s so sad.”
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None of Cabral’s story explains how a nation this size got here at all. Cape Verde has a population of roughly 525,000, the smallest nation ever to reach a men’s World Cup knockout stage, and had gone unbeaten through the group without winning a match to get here. Long before any of this seemed possible, Cabral had told his family: “I’m going to be a great football player, I’m gonna reach the top. And I’m living in my dream now,” he told the Guardian. Before facing the best player of his generation, he had already worked out how to hold the occasion at arm’s length. “If you’re like, oh, it’s Messi, you’re gonna lose your mind,” he said. After the final whistle, he was thinking of someone else entirely. “I’m going to swap my shirt with Otamendi,” he told Brazilian outlet Lance. “He was my teammate until this season.”
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Portuguese-language coverage of the defeat found little room for grief. Maisfutebol wrote there was no space that night for tears of sadness in Praia, Mindelo, Sal, or the diaspora scattered across the world, only tears of pride large enough to spill across the Atlantic. Cape Verde goes home from its first World Cup in the round of 32. Cabral’s goal against Messi’s Argentina stays.
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