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The FIFA World Cup 2026 Team of the Tournament was released this week. Eleven players. Messi. Haaland. Mbappé. Rodri. Bellingham. Upamecano. And then, in goal, a 40-year-old from the island of São Vicente who used to wire electrical circuits for a living and whose nickname translates, loosely, as Little Granny. Josimar José Évora Dias — Vozinha — is the only African in the XI. He is also the only player in it who did not reach the semi-finals. He got further than that. He became the standard against which every other goalkeeper at the tournament was measured.
Cape Verde were eliminated in the round of 32 by Argentina, losing 3-2 in extra time after leading the defending world champions deep into additional minutes. By that point, Vozinha had already done the thing that defined the tournament's early weeks. On June 15 in Atlanta, he kept Spain — the side that would go on to win the World Cup without conceding more than one goal across eight matches — scoreless for 90 minutes. Seven saves. Zero goals. Player of the match. And then he sat on the pitch and cried.
The Name, the Career, the Path
Vozinha is not a stage name. It is the name his grandparents gave him when he was a child on São Vicente, raised by them while his father served in the military and his mother worked. When he moved to Angola to play for Progresso — one stop on a club career that would take him through Moldova, Portugal, Cyprus and Slovakia — there was already a goalkeeper named Josimar in the squad. He refused to become Josimar II. Everyone back home knew him as Vozinha. The shirt said Vozinha. It has said Vozinha ever since.
Before football became a full-time profession, he worked as an electrician. The career ran in parallel for years — the training sessions, the wiring jobs, the slow accumulation of caps for a national team from an island nation of 530,000 people that nobody expected to reach a World Cup. By the time Cape Verde qualified for the 2026 tournament — their debut appearance — Vozinha was 39 years old and approaching 90 international caps. The World Cup, he said before it began, was the most important moment of his life.
What He Did in Atlanta
Spain's opening group match against Cape Verde on June 15 was supposed to be a formality. Spain were the European champions, the pre-tournament co-favourites, and Cape Verde were debutants who had never played at this level. What followed instead was one of the most celebrated individual goalkeeping performances in World Cup history. Vozinha made seven saves — denying Ferran Torres, Pedri and Aymeric Laporte among others — in a match Cape Verde spent the majority of defending their own box. The final whistle blew 0-0. His teammates mobbed him. He wept.
His Instagram following moved from roughly 56,000 to over 14 million within days. FIFA named him player of the match. The image of him on the pitch, crying into his gloves, became the photograph that travelled furthest from the tournament's opening week. He was asked about it afterwards. He said he grew up with his grandparents. He said, unfortunately, they were not there to see it.
The Record and the Significance
Against Saudi Arabia in the group stage, Vozinha kept another clean sheet — and at 40 years and 12 days old, became only the third goalkeeper in World Cup history to record multiple clean sheets after turning 40, joining Peter Shilton at Italia 1990 and Dino Zoff at España 1982. Zoff won that tournament. The company Vozinha keeps in that record is not accidental. It is the result of thirty years of professional discipline from a man who spent part of his career wiring buildings.
Cape Verde went out to Argentina in the round of 32, losing 3-2 in extra time. Vozinha made eight saves in that match. Over the full tournament he made 18 saves from 23 shots faced — the third-highest save total among all goalkeepers at the point of Cape Verde's elimination. More significantly, Cape Verde did not lose a single match in 90 minutes across the entire World Cup. Every time the regulation clock ran out, they were still standing. That is Vozinha's record.
The Only African in the XI
The FIFA Team of the Tournament places Vozinha in goal with a back four of Cucurella, Upamecano, Emiliano Martínez — the Argentine keeper who made eleven saves in the final — and Porro. The midfield is Rodri, Bellingham, Olise. The front three is Messi, Haaland, Mbappé. It is, by any reading, a list assembled from the tournament's biggest stages: a World Cup final, semi-finals, quarter-finals. Vozinha's Cape Verde went out in the last 32. He is in the XI anyway, because the data from the group stage — from that one match in Atlanta against the team that won everything — could not be argued with.
He is the only African in the team. The continent sent ten nations to the tournament. Nine reached the knockout stage. None made the semi-finals. One goalkeeper, from the smallest nation in the field, made the Team of the Tournament. Cape Verde's population is 530,000. Spain's is 47 million. The scoreline from June 15 was 0-0. Those numbers sit together without requiring any further commentary. Sport Blot will carry the full tournament debrief — and what comes next for Vozinha and the Blue Sharks — in the days ahead.
