A Cape Verde soccer player got all the way to the World Cup thanks to a LinkedIn message

On Linked In, users may find thinkfluencers offering life lessons from mundane events and expired ghost job listings. But on occasion, they might also find the opportunity of a lifetime—as did Roberto “Pico” Lopes in his Linked In inbox. The Irish-born banker-turned-soccer player spent his athletic career as a center back playing for Ireland’s Shamrock Rovers, but thanks to a Linked In message, he took his career to the international stage. It started in 2019 when Rui Aguas, the head coach of Cape Verde—a small archipelago nation in Africa—found out about Lopes’s ancestry. His father had been born on the island nation, making Lopes eligible to represent Cape Verde under FIFA rules. And like most recruiting efforts nowadays, Aguas turned to LinkedIn to reach out to the player, cold messaging him in Portuguese, Cape Verde’s official language. But despite the dream proposal to join a national team, the message didn’t quite land as planned. “I thought it was a spam message and I took no notice of it,” Lopes recalled in an interview with BBC Sport. It took nine months for Lopes to respond to the message, when Aguas followed up with a message in English asking if Lopes had considered the offer. Upon translating the original message with Google Translate, Lopes realized he was being offered a position for Cape Verde’s national team. Recruiting for a soccer team through LinkedIn might seem like a rather strange avenue, with the platform mostly associated with corporate and and other office jobs. And while Lopes found it strange, too, that didn’t stop him from jumping on board. “[It] was explained to me afterwards that they had difficulty ⁠contacting my club, but when I saw the opportunity was there in front of me, I was 100% behind it from the minute one,” Lopes told Reuters. He joined the team in 2019, and while the national team missed out on the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, they qualified for the first time