Uzbekistan can’t win the World Cup. But it’s already won Washington’s attention.

Uzbekistan’s team will head home after its final group-stage match today, against the Democratic Republic of Congo. But the country has worked to use its début World Cup performance — the first ever by a Central Asian nation — to help Washington policymakers put a face to a geographical name once recognizable. Before the team’s match against Portugal this week, a group of ambassadors, policymakers and government officials met in Houston to discuss the United States’ burgeoning reliance on the “Central Five” nations — Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — for critical minerals. The only one of those so-called C5 countries to qualify for the World Cup is Uzbekistan. “This emergence of Uzbekistan on the soccer scene as a world-class team playing in the World Cup is sort of a microcosm for what’s happening for the entire C5 region,” Assistant Secretary of Commerce David Fogel said at the panel, which was hosted by the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition and the State Department. “The C5 region is front and center in everyone’s mind.” Trump is scaling up America’s footprint in Central Asia in hopes of reducing American reliance on Chinese supply chains, as Beijing grows increasingly dominant in the critical minerals sphere. In November, he hosted Uzbekistan’s President Shavkat Mirziyoyev at the White House to discuss the nations’ growing economic ties — and Mirziyoyev walked away agreeing to a $400 million investment in American companies’ critical minerals and rare earths supply chains. That commitment is “good not just for our economy, but also for our national security,” said Richard Parker, the leadership coalition’s senior policy adviser, “when you consider that China really has the market on the processing of critical minerals globally.” Mirziyoyev has praised his country’s soccer team as representatives of a “New Uzbekistan,” finally emerging from its Soviet era as a geopolitical force on its own terms, but after defeats in its first two m