Before the world cared, Cape Verdes showed Connecticut first

Cabo Verde vs. Bermuda • Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field in East Hartford, Connecticut • on June 6, 2026 photo by Aunia Forland

I’m going to admit something most tourism writers wouldn’t: I’m late on this piece. The Cape Verde-Bermuda friendly happened back on June 6, and by the time I sat down to actually write about it, Cape Verde had already gone and become the biggest story of the World Cup. Normally that’s a problem.

Here, it’s the whole reason to read this. Because if you were one of the few thousand people at Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field that Saturday night in East Hartford, you watched the opening scene of a story nobody else had read yet.

At the time, it was just a tune-up. Cape Verde – the Blue Sharks, a nation of roughly half a million people off the coast of West Africa – had already made history simply by qualifying for their first World Cup, becoming one of the smallest countries ever to do it. They’d flown into Boston a few days earlier after an eight-hour trip from Lisbon, greeted at the airport by a Cape Verdean diaspora crowd that had clearly been waiting a long time for this. Connecticut got their first U.S. training session. Then it got their last tune-up before the tournament: a 3-0 win over Bermuda, goals from Willy Semedo, Garry Rodrigues, and a stoppage-time finish from Nuno da Costa. Clean, controlled, businesslike. Nobody in that building could have told you it was a preview of anything historic. It just looked like a good team doing what good teams do.

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Nine days later, the good team turned into a phenomenon.

Cape Verde opened their World Cup against Spain – reigning European champions, tournament favorites, a team that put up 27 shots in that game alone – and walked away with a scoreless draw that’s already being talked about as one of the great upsets in the tournament’s history. The reason had a name: Vozinha. Cape Verde’s 40-year-old goalkeeper made seven saves, several of them at point-blank range, and turned into an overnight global star in the process – his Instagram following jumped from around 500,000 to over 17 million in a matter of days, more than plenty of the world’s biggest athletes.

And Cape Verde didn’t stop there. They drew Uruguay 2-2. They drew Saudi Arabia 0-0. Three group games, three draws, zero losses – enough to send the smallest nation ever to reach a World Cup knockout round through to the Round of 32, a feat no debutant nation had managed since Slovakia in 2010.

Today, that run puts them across from Lionel Messi and defending champion Argentina at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, kickoff at 6 p.m. Eastern. Nobody expects Cape Verde to win. Nobody expected any of this.

Which is what makes Rentschler Field’s small part in the story worth telling. Connecticut has hosted international friendlies for years – clubs and national teams passing through on their way to somewhere bigger, giving local fans a rare shot at watching world-class players up close. Most of those nights fade into “remember when we saw…” trivia. This one turned into something else: a chance to say you were in the building before the rest of the planet knew Cape Verde’s name.
Whatever happens against Argentina this afternoon, the Blue Sharks have already rewritten what’s possible for a country their size. And for the fans who showed up in East Hartford back in June – before the diaspora chants echoing off Rentschler Field meant anything to anyone outside that stadium – they got to watch it start.

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Before the world cared, Cape Verdes showed Connecticut first