The tiny island of Curacao is the smallest country to ever reach a FIFA World Cup, an honor it earned with an unbeaten run through an 18-month qualifying tournament in which it outscored opponents by nearly 2½ goals a game. But when it came time to introduce Curacao to the world during last Friday’s tournament draw, the Great One shot well wide of the net, stealing its glory.
“Ka-rak-ko,” Wayne Gretzky sputtered to a global TV audience FIFA estimated at more than a billion while drawing the country, which is pronounced koor-uh-SOW, into Group E for next summer’s tournament.
Few others are treating Curacao with such disregard.
“Every opponent deserves respect,” said German coach Julian Nagelsmann, whose team will face Curacao in its World Cup opener. “Curacao will be interesting to analyze. But we won’t make the mistake of underestimating them.”
That’s wise, said Curacao coach Dick Advocaat, who promised he isn’t coming to the U.S. for vacation.
“No, definitely not,” he said. “Otherwise, I can go to Spain.”
That’s not just big talk on Curacao’s part. Though she be but little, she is fierce.
“We are difficult to beat,” said Advocaat ,who at 78 is set to become the oldest coach in World Cup history. “It is a hard-working team with good organization. If you have a good organization, you can still do something against better teams.”
Although Curacao’s schedule has traditionally been chock-full of soft opponents such as Aruba, Saint Lucia and Grenada, Curacao also thumped World Cup qualifier Haiti 5-1 and tied Canada in the last seven months. And it lost just once in last summer’s CONCACAF Gold Cup.
If this World Cup is to have a Cinderella team, Curacao will probably be it.
A speck of an island with a land area of 171 square miles, Curacao is 40 miles north of Venezuela. And though it has a population of roughly 156,000, it has produced 17 major league baseball players — among them All-Stars Andruw Jones, Kenley Jansen and Jurickson Profar — the most per capita of any country in the world.
Soccer, however, may be the national pastime, due in large part to Curacao’s historic ties to the Netherlands.
Although originally settled by Spain, which considered it an island extension of Venezuela, Curacao was a Dutch colony for nearly four centuries. Because of its unique location between South and North America, most people in Curacao speak four languages — English, Spanish, Dutch and Papiamentu, a Creole blend of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and Arawak. And owing to the history of Dutch patronage, Curacaoans are among the most educated people in the Caribbean, with a literacy rate of 97%.
But in 2010, the Dutch dissolved the six-island territory known as the Netherlands Antilles, making Curacao a constituent nation within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. A year later Curacao played its first international match.
By then, some had already begun plotting a seemingly impossible path to the World Cup.
“Having an idea, having a vision, doesn’t mean that it will materialize. It takes hard work. It takes perseverance,” said Gilbert Martina, a former hospital CEO who became an advisor to the country’s soccer federation in 2002, nine years before it played its first game.
Martina had those traits in spades — as well as the diplomatic skills to negotiate a peace between feuding clubs that had brought competition in the island’s local league to a halt.
“You can see the results,” Martina, now president of the federation, said of the players who stuck it out, more than a dozen of whom began their careers before Curacao became independent.
“It’s really a unity based on what they want to achieve. Not for themselves but for the coach, for the staff, for the whole country.”
Like most of his players, Martina was born in Curacao but spent part of his life living and studying in the Netherlands. That close relationship — the Dutch have continued to manage Curacao’s national defense, foreign policy and have occasionally interfered in the country’s domestic politics since granting independence — is a big reason for the soccer team’s success.
Ten of the players on the roster for the final World Cup qualifier in November play professionally in the Netherlands. Others are with top teams in Turkey, Scotland, England, Belgium and Germany. Advocaat also played in Holland before embarking on a 44-year coaching career that included three stints with the Dutch national team and a World Cup appearance with South Korea.
Not surprisingly, Curacao’s approach is similar to that of the Netherlands, characterized by fluidity, adaptability and technical skills, traits not traditionally associated with most CONCACAF teams. Martina believes that philosophy, together with the smooth and manicured fields of a World Cup, will take his team to another level.
“It’s going to be interesting, the World Cup,” he said.
In addition to Germany, a four-time world champion, Curacao will play Ecuador, runner-up to Argentina in South American qualifying, and Ivory Coast, the reigning African champion, in the first round. It’s a tough group but not an impossible one to get through.
Germany went out in the first round in each of the last two World Cups; Ivory Coast hasn’t played in this tournament in 12 years and has never made it to the knockout stages; and Ecuador’s only trip to the second round came two decades ago. Plus eight of the World Cup’s 12 third-place teams will advance to the round of 32, something Curacao would likely do by winning just one of its three group-play games.
“In principle, every game is difficult, but it’s exciting to play there in that way, on the highest level, and we will see what we will do,” Advocaat said. “We have a team with a lot of fighters. And as I know from the experience, [that is] always difficult to beat.
“So every opponent who will play against us has to play very well.”
They should also learn how to pronounce “Curacao,” because by the end of the World Cup, the island country’s name could be better known than Gretzky’s.
You have read the latest installment of On Soccer with Kevin Baxter. The weekly column takes you behind the scenes and shines a spotlight on unique stories. Listen to Baxter on this week’s episode of the “Corner of the Galaxy” podcast.
The post Why tiny Curacao could be the Cinderella team of the 2026 World Cup appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
