For ignorant millennials, the FIFA World Cup was a better atlas than geography lessons at school. Korea-Japan 2002 taught us where Henri Camara’s Senegal was located. Germany 2006 made it impossible not to know about Andriy Shevchenko’s Ukraine. South Africa 2010 prompted a generation to learn about Asamoah Gyan’s Ghana.
Had USA-Mexico-Canada 2026 been played in that era, we would have run into a problem. We would have scoured through the world map to find Curacao — the team that restricted Ecuador to a 0-0 stalemate on Sunday — and found nothing. They are a tiny dot on a physical map.
Senior & Co., Curaçao’s oldest distillery and the producer of the original Blue Curaçao liqueur, acknowledges the irony on its website: “The funny thing is that now many people know the term Blue Curaçao, but don’t know that Curaçao is also an island.” And you would not be accused of geographical blasphemy for the same. The island has a population of 158,000. Ranked 189th. They have an area of 444 square kilometres.
Ranked 199th. They are the smallest nation — both in terms of population and area — to ever play at a World Cup. At Kansas City, however, they demonstrated they had not travelled to the United States merely to make up the numbers.
The football team itself is an apt reflection of the island’s history and multicultural identity. The first people to call Curaçao home were the Caquetío. Then came the European powers. The Spanish. The British. The Dutch. Once a ranching outpost, it became a hub of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century — a redistribution centre for the enslaved Africans.
Like every oppressed populace, Curacao has had its revolutions. Walk through the Kura Hulanda Museum, and the story of Tula will reveal itself. Inspired by the Haitian and French revolutions, Tula led an uprising. It did not yield anything significant — Tula was captured and executed before he could achieve his mission. On the lanes of Willemstad, though, his legacy lives on. The draw with Ecuador, in a similar fashion, may survive only as a footnote in the wider narrative of Group E — squeezed between Germany’s last-gasp winner and the Netherlands’ five-goal exhibition. But for those 158,000 inhabitants, it will become folklore.