The group stage of the Africa Cup of Nations ended on Wednesday, the tournament in which the 24 best African national football teams compete every two years and which is being played in Ivory Coast. In this first part of the tournament there have already been several surprising results: national teams considered among the favourites, such as Ghana, Algeria and Tunisia, were eliminated, while other less popular teams won their groups, such as Angola, Equatorial Guinea and above all Cape Verde, which came first with 7 points ahead of Egypt, Ghana and Mozambique. On Monday 29 January they will face Mauritania in the round of 16, another national team that has reached this point in a rather unexpected way.
Cape Verde’s first place is decidedly exceptional: both because it came at the expense of two of the strongest and most successful national teams in the history of the Africa Cup of Nations such as Egypt and Ghana (who won it 7 and 4 times respectively), and if you consider that it is a very small town, with very particular characteristics and a very young history.
Cape Verde is an archipelago of volcanic origin made up of ten islands and about 500 kilometers away from the coast of Senegal, in the Atlantic Ocean. It became independent from Portugal in 1975 and today has just under 600 thousand inhabitants, very few to be able to select around twenty high-level football players: for comparison, Egypt has around 110 million inhabitants. The men’s national football team is coached by former Cape Verdean footballer Pedro Leitão Brito, more often called by his nickname, Bubista.
In the first match of the group Cape Verde won 2-1 against Ghana with goals from Jamiro Monteiro and Garry Mendes Rodrigues, both players born in the Netherlands but naturalized Cape Verdeans. In the second match they beat Mozambique 3-0 with goals from Bebé, Ryan Mendes and Kevin Pina. In the last match they drew 2-2 against a very strong national team like Egypt, despite already being sure of first place in the group, scoring the goal to make it 2-2 in the 99th minute: a sign of the players’ deep participation .
The players called up by Cape Verde for the African Cup of Nations are all professionals and play around the world, in seventeen different leagues and countries: many of them have dual citizenship, but have decided to play for the Cape Verdean national team, fueling a virtuous circle that has continuously raised the team’s level in recent years. As often happens for such small national teams and young countries, to be able to put together a competitive group the coach must do a lot of research, scouting and then convincing individual players of good quality who have dual citizenship, and therefore they could decide to play for their other national team, perhaps more highly rated.
One of them, the full-back Roberto Lopes, who plays in Ireland for Shamrock Rovers and has an Irish mother and a Cape Verdean father, he said of having been contacted by the national team coach on LinkedIn, the well-known social network where job offers are sought and disseminated which however is particularly distant from the ways in which footballers are usually chosen. Among the best known is the 25-year-old striker Jovane Cabral, who plays for Salernitana and in 2022 had also spent six months at Lazio, becoming the first Cape Verdean to play in the Italian Serie A.
However, the most famous player of the national team is probably Bebé (nickname of Tiago Manuel Correia Dias), the one who scored a goal from a much commented free kick from almost 40 meters away from the goal against Mozambique. Bebè was born in 1990 in Sintra, Portugal, grew up in an orphanage and played six matches for Portugal’s under-21s as a youngster. However, he never made his debut with the senior Portuguese national team, and in 2022 he was therefore able to choose to represent his country of origin, that is, Cape Verde. Today he is 33 years old and plays in Spain, for Rayo Vallecano, as a winger or attacking midfielder.
In 2010, when he was still playing in the Portuguese lower leagues, he was purchased by Manchester United, one of the most prestigious English teams in the world, and coached by the historic Scottish coach Sir Alex Ferguson. He arrived on the advice of Ferguson’s old assistant coach, Carlos Queiroz. Manchester was one of the best teams in Europe in those years and had just sold another Portuguese player, Cristiano Ronaldo, to Real Madrid. The leap from the Portuguese second division to the top of the Premier League was too challenging for Bebé, however, and he left United after just two league appearances, beginning a tour between various European clubs that eventually led him to his current club in Spain.
The team before the match against Ghana (AP Photo/Sunday Alamba)
However, the excellent African Cup of Nations played so far by Cape Verde is not an isolated case. In 2013 he participated for the first time and, surprisingly, reached the quarter-finals. Also in 2015 and 2021 she qualified again for the tournament, reaching the round of 16 in the second case, while in 2014 she even qualified for the World Cup in Brazil, but was then ousted for having fielded a player who was disqualified.
Cape Verde’s rise in African football in recent decades has been rather rapid: in just 14 years, from 2000 to 2014, it went from 182nd to 27th place in the FIFA ranking, the ranking of national teams drawn up by the body that governs football world, based on their results.
In 2000 he won the Amílcar Cabral Cup, a tournament played between West African national teams between 1979 and 2007. That year the event was organized in Cape Verde, which he won by beating Senegal in the final. That success had attracted the attention of FIFA, which began to invest in the development of sport in the Cape Verdean archipelago, starting from the structures: «In 1998 the country had no grass pitches, now there are 25», he explained in 2016 an in-depth analysis by CNN.
Patrick Andrade, midfielder of Cape Verde and Qarabag, an Azerbaijani team (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)
Since the early 2000s, football in Cape Verde has become increasingly popular, and over time the country has been able to produce several very talented players. On 31 March 2015 the national team achieved another historic result, beating Portugal 2-0 in a friendly: a victory with great symbolic significance, considering the over 400 years of Portuguese colonial history in the Cape Verdean archipelago.
In the next edition of the World Cup, which will be played in 2026 between Canada, the United States and Mexico, the number of participating teams will be expanded from 32 to 48 and the places available for the African national teams will increase from five to nine. Cape Verde’s chances of qualifying for the final phase of the World Cup for the first time will therefore increase. Meanwhile, after winning the group, Cape Verde will try to move forward in a tournament that up to this point has been very unpredictable and spectacular. The round of 16 will begin on Saturday 27 January and, as with the group stage matches, in Italy they will be broadcast free-to-air on the Sportitalia channel.