Cape Verde’s Roberto Lopes was working at a bank when he was recruited on LinkedIn to play soccer—he thought it was spam, now he’s at the World Cup

When Roberto Lopes received a seemingly random LinkedIn message in 2018, he assumed it was spam and ignored it.

At the time, Lopes—nicknamed “Pico”—was working at a Dublin bank while playing part-time for Shamrock Rovers, an Irish soccer club. Born to an Irish mother and a Cape Verdean father, he had unknowingly been flagged by Cape Verde national team coach Rui Aguas, who was searching for eligible players to bolster the squad of the small West African island nation.

Nine months later, Aguas followed up—this time in English—asking if Lopes had seen his earlier message.

“I copied the [initial] message and put it into Google Translate, and it basically said, ‘We’re looking at getting new players into the Cape Verde squad and would you be interested in declaring for Cape Verde?’” Lopes recalled to BBC Sport.

“I was absolutely buzzing with that. I was like, ‘Yep, 100% I’d love to be a part of the squad’.”

Just three weeks later, after scrambling to get documents from his father like a birth certificate and passport, Lopes was on a plane to make his international debut against Togo. 

Now, Cape Verde and Lopes are making their World Cup debut

Over the next seven years, Lopes became a fixture in the........

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