The smallest nation ever to qualify for the World Cup didn’t do it alone

Before Gilbert Martina took the job as president of Curaçao’s soccer federation in 2023, he asked his wife for her opinion.

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“She said, ‘Hell, no, you’re not going to do that,’” Martina said.

At the time, Martina already had one demanding job as the chief executive of a medical center on the Caribbean island. The soccer job would be no less tricky. Curaçao, a nation of 156,000 located 40 miles off Venezuela, had never qualified its national team, the Blue Wave, for the World Cup. Martina was well aware of the challenges — for two decades, he’d helped the federation raise money for World Cup qualification attempts that all fell short.

That changed last fall, when Curaçao became the smallest nation ever to qualify for the world’s biggest sporting event, on a November night that moved Martina to “tears, tears, tears, tears of joy,” he said.

“Becoming a father, becoming a husband, those are moments of extreme joy in your life. But this moment is unique,” Martina told NBC News. “You will never, never experience something like that again. I cry like a child.”

Curaçao’s World Cup debut this month will come when the tournament has never been bigger — played across three countries, with a field that grew from 32 to 48 teams. The expansion created more opportunities for nations that had rarely, if ever, participated, such as Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, each of which will take the field at the World Cup for the first time since 1974. Curaçao is one of four debutants, joining Cape Verde, Jordan and Uzbekistan.

Playing in Group E, Curaçao opens June 14 against Germany, a four-time champion with a population of 83 million. It finishes group play against Ecuador (June 20) and Ivory Coast (June 25).

“I cannot describe it,” Gersley Gijsbertha, the technical director of Curaçao’s football federation, said of the mood on the island. “All the places are blue.”

That is a significant shift in a place where all things soccer once were orange, the national color of the Netherlands, which controlled the island since it established trading posts there in the 1600s. Curaçao’s place within the Kingdom of the Netherlands meant it acted essentially as a feeder system for the European country’s powerful national team, the Oranje. From 1962 until 2010, players who were either Curaçao-born or part of the island’s diaspora also tried, unsuccessfully, to qualify for the World Cup representing the Netherlands Antilles, a collection of Dutch-controlled Caribbean islands that included Curaçao.

When the Netherlands Antilles dissolved in 2010, Curaçao had the opportunity to represent itself within FIFA, soccer’s global governing body.

Building a national team wasn’t as straightforward as scouting local talent. Just 28% of its population is younger than 29, and 25% are 65 or older, the highest percentage of seniors among the six islands that make up the Caribbean part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

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But as a constituent country within the Netherlands, Curaçao could look outside its 171 square miles to find players in its diaspora. About 81,000 Curaçao-born immigrants live in the Netherlands, and 71,000 more who are born in the Netherlands have ties to the island, according to census data.

It has become common for nations in the World Cup, including the United States, to stock rosters using “dual-national” players who weren’t born in those countries but have familial ties to them. Curaçao’s 26-man roster includes just one player who was born and raised there, Tahith Chong, a midfielder who plays in England’s second-highest professional level. With so many Blue Wave players living and playing professionally in Europe, it was more cost-effective to hold the national team’s pair of pre-Cup training camps in Turkey than in Curaçao, Martina said.

Livano Comenencia, a Netherlands-born right back on the Blue Wave, said his Curaçao-born parents were “over the moon” at the island’s World Cup berth. “My dad’s got a big smile permanently plastered across his face,” he told FIFA.com.

Martina looked abroad for coaching, too — the kind of big name who would signal the team’s ambitions to become a regional powerhouse and attract private funding to cover the costs of flying across the Caribbean for multiple qualification matches. (The national team also receives public funding, Martina said.) When Bert van Marwijk and Louis van Gaal, two past managers of the Netherlands’ national team, passed on the job, a third, Dick Advocaat, said yes. In November, Advocaat led the team to its historic qualification following a draw against Jamaica, a game Gijsbertha watched from a hotel room in Colombia while he was working for Curaçao’s Economic Development Ministry.

“When it was finished, I can say it, I cry,” Gijsbertha said. “I cry a lot, because not of the winning, because of the years that we try to come to the fight. I don’t forget it because that was one of the days for me that, OK, we made it.”

Gijsbertha, who took over as technical director in April, acknowledged that Curaçao can tap into advantages gained from its connection to the Netherlands, from high-level coaching and facilities to a strong youth development system. There is a hope that Curaçao’s World Cup debut will help persuade its promising players to “develop in Holland, and when we need them, we call them back to try to give our national team the best,” Gijsbertha said. “That’s our advantages we have, and we will make use of them all the time.”

Martina likened it, aspirationally, to the way players of Moroccan lineage had often played for France. In 2022, Morocco became the first African country to advance to the World Cup semifinals.

“It’s definitely more than football. It’s pride, it’s identity, it’s culture, and for the diaspora, it gives players a belief that the paths to the highest, highest event as a football player, which is the World Cup, is also possible with Curaçao, not only for the Netherlands,” Martina said.

“We have quite a lot of talented players that choose to play for the Netherlands, because up till now it was not possible to reach a World Cup for Curaçao, so it’s definitely a shift, a mind shift, that things that once were thought to be impossible have become possible, and hopefully that will open the door into the future.”

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