Eight years ago, the island nation of Cape Verde unearthed a player they hoped would help them make history. He was a tough, burly defender, the sort of competitor they would need if they were going to go toe-to-toe with soccer’s mightiest superpowers in the World Cup.
There was just one problem: they couldn’t reach him.
The team had messaged Roberto “Pico” Lopes on LinkedIn when it learned that Lopes’s father was from Cape Verde. But Lopes—who was born in Ireland, had worked as a banker in Dublin, and was playing for Shamrock Rovers—didn’t read Portuguese. He ignored the message until Cape Verde tried again months later.
“I never thought this would be the route to international football,” Lopes said.
As it turns out, finding a World Cup player on LinkedIn was just the start of one of the World Cup’s most improbable stories. On Friday night in Houston, Cape Verde became the smallest nation in the World Cup’s 96-year history to reach the knockout rounds.
“The team was very eager to show this to the whole world,” said Cape Verde’s coach, known as Bubista. “We have shown that we are a small country, but that we fight for the things that we want to achieve.”
When the team nicknamed the “Blue Sharks” first touched down in America, they looked likely to be returning home almost immediately. Cape Verde is made of a chain of islands off of the African coast that comprise about 1,500 square miles and just over 500,000 people, and they’d never before appeared at a World Cup.
No country that tiny—by area or population—had ever played a single knockout match in the tournament.
The teams they were slated to play against, on the other hand, were soccer behemoths with standing appointments in the deep rounds of the World Cup. Cape Verde’s first two opponents were former champions Uruguay and Spain—with a population nearly 100 times larger than Cape Verde’s.
Forget winning. Cape Verde’s chances of so much as salvaging draws out of those two matches was about as likely as landing a World Cup gig on the internet: a paltry 2.7%, according to pregame betting odds.
But that’s when the Blue Sharks started pulling off one miracle after another. First, they held the defending European champion Spain to a scoreless draw. Then, they banged a pair of goals past Uruguay in a 2-2 thriller.
And on Friday, in the biggest game one of the World Cup’s tiniest nations had ever played, Cape Verde applied relentless pressure to Saudi Arabia, to secure another draw. Their work wasn’t quite finished at the final whistle: For a few agonizing moments the Blue Sharks huddled around a phone near the sideline, watching the final seconds of Uruguay’s loss before they could officially start their celebration.
“One percent, one percent!” the team chanted as they danced in circles in the locker room—referring to their miniscule chances of surviving this far.
The magic of Cape Verde lies in just how many of the Blue Sharks arrived from faraway shores. Fifteen of the 26 players on Cape Verde’s roster were born away from the chain of islands off of Africa’s west coast—in Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the U.S.—earning their places in the squad through family lineage.
Once they put on the uniforms of their ancestral homeland, though, this motley group of far-flung footballers turned into the World Cup’s biggest surprise. Facing Spain, the hero was Vozinha, a 40-year-old goalkeeper whose career had taken him to clubs in Cyprus and Moldova. A man who only began playing professional soccer at age 25 made seven saves to keep a clean sheet against La Roja.
And the most important goal in Cape Verde history—the equalizer against Uruguay—came from Hélio Varela. He is in many ways the perfect representative of the globe-trotting Sharks, having been born nearly 2,000 miles from Cape Verde in Portugal and plying his trade professionally for Maccabi Tel Aviv.
Cape Verde’s reward now is a matchup against Lionel Messi and Argentina in the round of 32. And this time, salvaging draws and scraping a point isn’t an option.
It’s win or go home—wherever home happens to be.
Write to Robert O’Connell at robert.oconnell@wsj.com