dpThe cultural significance of a World Cup was captured in very modern terms four years ago when a post from Lionel Messi in the aftermath of Argentina’s final win over France attracted more likes than any other on the Instagram platform.
A total of 74.7million users have pressed the heart button, which is 15m more than any other post in Instagram’s history. A post from Messi cradling the World Cup trophy, uploaded two days later, also attracted an implausible 53m likes.
That, to many, was considered the moment that anointed Messi as football’s greatest, with a personal checklist completed in Qatar: the crowning glory that he and his supporters had longed to see play out.
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World Cups have long held that power to shape lives and legacies — from Pele to Diego Maradona, Geoff Hurst to Gerd Muller — but the last week has also underlined how the tournament can still make overnight stars of the most unlikely characters.
Just ask Vozinha, the most lauded of Cape Verde’s heroes. The 40-year-old goalkeeper was the scourge of European champions Spain in a 0-0 draw that was one of the World Cup’s greatest ever upsets.
An international audience fell hard for Vozinha on Monday and, almost in an instant, made him a social media star.
In the 24 hours that followed Cape Verde’s stalemate with Spain, Vozinha’s Instagram following jumped from around 50,000 to 7m. By Friday morning, with Cape Verde preparing for their next test against Uruguay this weekend, that number had swelled to 14m.
Vozinha flies the Cape Verde flag after their historic draw with Spain (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
Context makes the figures all the more improbable. Vozinha, all of a sudden, can now claim to have a bigger Instagram following than England’s Bukayo Saka (8.1m), Norway captain Martin Odegaard (7.2m) and the USMNT’s brightest star Christian Pulisic (7.5m). Continue at this rate and he might soon be chasing down the reigning Ballon d’Or winner, France’s Ousmane Dembele (21.2m).
And all because of one clean sheet.
“A World Cup can absolutely transform a profile,” says Owen Laverty, of Ear to the Ground, a creative sports agency. “It can be a crowning moment for an icon and also a time to announce the arrival of the next great thing. We’ve been used to those stories for ages but Vozinha demonstrates that some of the biggest icons coming out of these tournaments now aren’t always the most talented.
“You can become an icon because of a particular moment or a story that they represent. This is the underdog story but it also reflects where football culture is now at.
“People consume football in lots of different ways, so it’s not just the winning. It can be about just how exciting or sticky one moment can be, something that entrenches that person in people’s heads. That’s one of the big things that’s changed. It used to be about the great thing but it can now be about the interesting or unusual thing.”
Cape Verde’s goalkeeper might soon belong in the same canon as another African, Roger Milla, whose name is perhaps more synonymous with the 1990 World Cup than any of the West Germany team that eventually lifted the trophy in Rome. Milla was Cameroon’s goalscoring king, dancing at corner flags in celebration when debuting in a World Cup aged 38.
“Roger Milla wasn’t necessarily about being the best player at that tournament. It was about personality, his story and that celebration,” adds Laverty. “That’s what people were drawn to and a World Cup is still one of the true global platforms. TV and the media gets more fragmented, but the World Cup is still the ultimate showcase. There’s nothing like it.”
Roger Milla became a global superstar after the 1990 World Cup (Allsport UK/Allsport)
Performances help but so, too, does a backstory and Vozinha’s is nothing if not unusual. He wasn’t even a professional footballer until he was 25, as he embarked on a career that has included stints in Cape Verde, Moldova, Portugal, Cyprus and Slovakia.
Monday also brought the revelation that Vozinha’s mother had been unable to afford the cost of a visa needed to travel to the U.S. (a situation officials say they are trying to resolve). Post-match tears were also reserved for his late grandparents, who had raised him as a child.
Vozinha embodies the charm of the underdog and also the sometimes peculiar nature of modern sporting fame.
The Olympics made viral stars out of Paul and Gary O’Donovan in 2016, the rowing brothers from Ireland best known for their colourful post-race assessments, and again in 2024 with Yusuf Dikec, the shooter from Turkey who pitched up in Paris for the Olympics with no equipment beyond his pistol. That both of those stories ended with a silver medal, rather than gold, was lost in the fun.
There is nothing, though, quite like a World Cup for the elevation of a profile. Tim Payne, the New Zealand defender, is another to feel its powers in the last month after seeing his social media followers balloon from 5,000 to almost 6m after being dubbed “FIFA’s least known player”.
Why Cape Verde and Spain’s draw was a shocking upset
Felipe Cardenas
“It’s the centre stage of the world,” says Ehsen Shah, founder of B-Engaged, the sports marketing specialists who represent a number of players at the World Cup. “You’re never going to get that opportunity where so many eyeballs around the world are either watching you live, on the highlights or on the news around the tournament.
“What you do on the pitch in those big tournaments drives your engagement and your followership. There are clear and direct parallels.
“If I use Alphonso Davies as an example, scoring Canada’s first-ever World Cup goal, we saw a spike off the back of that. It’s the same when Kai Havertz or Serge Gnabry has done it for Germany.
“You see spikes that you can tie to moments; it’s a direct correlation. You go far wider than just your followership and the people who care about your club or your country. Wider populations start to ask: ‘Who is this guy?’. You learn more about that person because of what they’ve done on the pitch. It’s word of mouth where you become the person that everyone is talking about.”
For all the excited chatter about the performances of Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland in recent days, Vozinha is also now part of the global conversation.
