Hope in the Islands
When Haiti, Curacao, and Cape Verde entered the party.
On Tuesday night, under an inky black Caribbean sky, the Haiti football team punched their ticket to next summer’s FIFA Men’s World Cup. They will be amongst the forty-eight teams playing the most prestigious tournament in football, the most watched tournament in all of sport.
The Haitian football coach, a Frenchman named Sebastian Migne, has never visited the country. “There are no more international flights landing there,” he recently told France Football magazine. Think about that for a second. The man drawing up tactical formations and giving half-time team talks has never set foot in the nation whose anthem plays before kickoff.
A documentary, released earlier this year, starts with the words, “When you hear news from Haiti, it’s always guns and crime.” A bit on the nose perhaps, until you start leafing through the reports. One news bulletin, from August 2016, carried the face of midfielder Harold Fédé with the caption, “mortally wounded by a bullet in his back.”
The team itself haven’t played a home game in four years. That’s an entire World Cup cycle spent in exile. There are some, like midfielder Carl Fred Sainte, who have never experienced the goosebumps from walking out in that all-blue kit to a heaving open-roof stadium and a hundred hand drums playing merengue beats.
Everything came to a standstill the day their president was killed in his house. On July 7, 2021, President Jovenel Moïse was shot twelve times across his forehead and torso. His left eye was gouged out, his arms and ankles were broken. And since that day, the country has been pitching into an abyss, every day a new episode of chaos and lawlessness.
In January 2023, the terms of the country’s last ten sitting senators expired, leaving it with no nationally elected officials.
Today, Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince belongs to whoever carries the biggest gun. Armed groups control about 85% of the city. Between late 2024 and mid-2025, more than 4,800 Haitians have been victims of gang violence. More than 1.3 million have been displaced. This time last year, the Haitian gang Gran Grif picked up rifles and blazed through Pont-Sonde, killing 70, displacing 6000.
When armed gangsters are not killing them, their circumstances are. Recent UN‑backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis reports about 5.7 million Haitians, roughly 51% of the population, facing acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or worse). At least one in four children in Haiti is currently out of school, driven by gang violence, displacement, and the cost of schooling. Health-care facilities shut down every other day, and cholera has been spreading through its capital. Life in Haiti could hardly be called life.
In between all this, the Haitian people have also lost access to public spaces. Since March 2024, the Stade Sylvio Cator, once the home of the national football team, has been taken over by men with guns. In the last four years, the team have played all their “home” games in the tiny Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao.
They made it to the World Cup.
Curaçao, with a population of 155,826 - lesser than Florence and Salzburg - and a land area of 171 square miles, also qualified for the World Cup on the same night.
Until 2010, they weren’t even a proper football nation, but a tourist brochure, an island contoured by white sand beaches, surrounded by pearly blue water. Some of us also knew of it as the place that inspired a plastic-y syrup.
The top two teams from their football league got to compete in the Netherlands Antilles Championship. Only after the dissolution of Netherlands Antilles, in 2010, could Curacao become a full member of FIFA.
Curaçao remains within the Dutch kingdom. But when they play their first World Cup game, becoming the smallest nation to ever play in the tournament, they will be wearing the Curacao flag and crest. For them, their connection to the Dutch is a matter of pride. Their coach, and most of their players, are Dutch.
Cape Verde completes this trinity of the improbable. Population 491,000, another former colony making music with whatever instruments history left lying around. They had held the record for the smallest country to qualify before Curaçao entered the chat. Like Curaçao, Cape Verde has effectively leveraged its diaspora, using players born in Europe to Cape Verdean parents to raise the technical ceiling of their squad. Et, voila!
I’ll level with you - if you bumped into me on the street yesterday, and asked me to name one footballer from Cape Verde, Curacao, or Haiti, I would’ve tumbled and fumbled to a shot-in-the-dark guess, at best. Their players don’t make it to the newswires and social media timelines, don’t get spots at the most popular football leagues in the world, and never ever become news.
These teams exist in football’s peripheral vision, glimpsed occasionally in episodic cycles as the bottom-table guarantees when the Americas or Africa are playing qualifiers. They are the fodder Brazil and Argentina raise their goal-difference against.
We barely get to hear of them through pop-culture either. I mean, Wyclef Jean is the closest I’ve ever been to experiencing Haitian arts.
The World Cup’s expansion helps, obviously. Next year’s gala will include 48 teams - sixteen additional spots on top of the usual 32. With USA, Canada, and Mexico hosting and qualifying by default, it frees up three more, precious, spots. But that’s merely a door wedged open. You could have a 100-team World Cup and it would still be incredible for nations like Cape Verde and Curacao to make the final cut.
Curacao’s GDP is approximately $3.28 billion, Cape Verde’s about $2.9 billion. To put this in perspective, a mid-sized American city has a GDP exceeding $50 billion - about 20 times larger than Curacao’s total economy - and an average income far above the island nations.
And then, Haiti. On 11th June 2026, when Donald Trump declares the 23rd FIFA Men’s World Cup open, with twenty-three members of the Haitian team within a goalkick’s distance, it will be nearly one year since he signed a proclamation that banned Haitians from getting US visas.
It will make for an incredible picture. And, you could argue, that’s about it. The players will go to America, play their matches, and return to countries still struggling with the same problems. Haiti will still be run by gangs; Curaçao will still be smaller than most London boroughs; and Cape Verde will still be a bunch of volcanic islands that most people can’t spell, let alone locate.
But for a few weeks in the summer of 2026, they’ll stand on the same pitches as Mbappé and Bellingham and the entire global football constellation. They’ll sing their anthems. Their flags will fly next to all the others. Kids in Port-au-Prince and Willemstad and Praia will watch their heroes on television and think, for just a moment, that anything might be possible.
That’s not nothing. In fact, in a world that seems increasingly determined to sort people into winners and losers before a match even starts, it might be more important than we realise.
Most days, sport is just a tv show, an infinite loop of the same things set to various backdrops. Champions rise and fall, records break and respawn, money changes hands. But, every once in a while, you switch off the TV and walk over to a bookstore. There you find, hidden in the shelves, sandwiched between the bestsellers, a bookjacket with a hand-drawn cover. It’s made by an eclectic artist whose name you hadn’t heard; written in choral prose that makes you smell the spring bellflower and feel the autumn wind. It comes home with you, and eventually makes its place on your bookshelf for everyone to see.
The story of Haiti, Curacao, and Cape Verde is one such.