In our Destination World Cup 2026 series, we will be telling the stories of players, teams and countries as they prepare for next summer’s tournament. To kick us off, Nick Miller travelled to Cape Verde to witness a remarkable underdog story.

Dailon Livramento was slumped on the floor. Pico Lopes was looking for his dad in the crowd. Stopira was hugging everyone. Steven Moreira didn’t know what to do with himself.

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“For the moment, I don’t think I know how I feel,” Moreira, the Columbus Crew defender, told The Athletic, with a massive grin on his face that suggested he’d figure it out soon enough.

But it’s difficult to know how you’re supposed to feel when you’ve just helped your country qualify for the World Cup for the first time. And particularly when you are the second-smallest nation to ever make it to the biggest sporting event on the planet, after Iceland.

Cape Verde, a collection of 10 islands off the west coast of Africa with a population of around 525,000 and which was a Portuguese colony until 1975, have done something improbable.

They needed a win in their final qualification game against Eswatini to finish the job and top a group featuring Cameroon, a team who have been at eight of the past 11 World Cups. On paper, Monday’s match looked like something close to a walkover against a side who last won a World Cup qualifier in 2015. But for the first half, it didn’t feel like that — 45 minutes that was less a football match, more an entire nation having a nervous breakdown.

Officially, there were about 15,000 people inside the stadium. But given how packed the aisles and gangways were, the real figure was probably higher. Tickets were tough to come by: they were sold at petrol stations and pastry shops around Praia, the capital city. Some were sold online, specifically to those in the diaspora, but many of those ended up in the hands of relatives back in Cape Verde. Wherever they bought their tickets, they were tense: was their big chance slipping away?

But all of that tension dissipated three minutes after the break, when Livramento for