The smallest nation ever to qualify for the World Cup didn’t do it alone

World CupThe smallest nation ever to qualify for the World Cup didn’t do it aloneFor generations, Curaçao sent its best players to play for the Netherlands. Now the island of 156,000 has a team all its own in the World Cup.The Curaçao team huddles during a friendly match against Scotland in Glasgow on Saturday.Craig Williamson - SNS Group / SNS Group via Getty ImagesShareAdd NBC News to GoogleJune 5, 2026, 6:32 AM EDTBy Andrew GreifBefore Gilbert Martina took the job as president of Curaçao’s soccer federation in 2023, he asked his wife for her opinion. Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.“She said, ‘Hell, no, you’re not going to do that,’” Martina said.At the time, Martina already had one demanding job as the chief executive of a medical center on the Caribbean island. The soccer job would be no less tricky. Curaçao, a nation of 156,000 located 40 miles off Venezuela, had never qualified its national team, the Blue Wave, for the World Cup. Martina was well aware of the challenges — for two decades, he’d helped the federation raise money for World Cup qualification attempts that all fell short.That changed last fall, when Curaçao became the smallest nation ever to qualify for the world’s biggest sporting event, on a November night that moved Martina to “tears, tears, tears, tears of joy,” he said.“Becoming a father, becoming a husband, those are moments of extreme joy in your life. But this moment is unique,” Martina told NBC News. “You will never, never experience something like that again. I cry like a child.”Curaçao’s World Cup debut this month will come when the tournament has never been bigger — played across three countries, with a field that grew from 32 to 48 teams. The expansion created more opportunities for nations that had rarely, if ever, participated, such as Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, each of which will take the field at the World Cup for the first time since 1974. Cu...