A 40 year old goalkeeper from a nation of half a million held Spain scoreless at the World Cup on Monday, then woke to millions of new followers.
Cape Verde, the smallest country at the tournament and a World Cup debutant, frustrated one of the favourites in Atlanta. Spain piled up 27 shots with seven on target, but Josimar Dias, known to everyone as Vozinha, turned them all away for a clean sheet and the player of the match award.
The fame arrived within hours. Vozinha began Monday with roughly 50,000 Instagram followers and passed eight million by the next day, more than ten times the population of his country, with many of the new fans coming from Brazil before the wider football world joined in.
His rise followed a long, unglamorous road. Vozinha turned professional at 25 and spent his career with clubs few fans would recognise, in Moldova, Angola, Cyprus and Slovakia, winning a single trophy along the way, and has represented Cape Verde since 2012. He had once thought about walking away from the national team, he said afterwards, but stayed for the dream. “We deserve to be here,” he said.
The result rippled into the betting markets. On the prediction platform Polymarket, one user staked close to $999,000 on Spain to win at about 92 percent odds and lost the lot. Another, who put $400,000 on Spain not to win, walked away with roughly $4.7 million.
The nickname Vozinha, Portuguese for little grandmother, came from older children who beat him on the pitch as a boy and mocked him for running home to his grandparents. He has since made it his own. Cape Verde face Uruguay and Saudi Arabia next, and a win in either match would push a country that arrived chasing history toward the knockout rounds.
