Gino van Kessel’s road to the World Cup started with a Facebook message. A few months ago, just after he had joined Arles-Avignon, the French side, an unsolicited note popped into the striker’s inbox. It contained the sort of offer that, on the internet, falls somewhere between surprising and suspicious: he was being invited to try to help the tiny Caribbean island of Curaçao to make it to Russia 2018.
Van Kessel was born and raised in the Dutch city of Alkmaar. He had been to Curaçao only three times, all childhood holidays. It had not occurred to him, he admits, that the place even had a national team, much less one with ambitions of beating the likes of Mexico, the United States and Costa Rica to one of Concacaf’s World Cup slots.
He may not have been aware of them, but they certainly were of him. “The message was from a guy working for the national team,” the 22-year-old says. “He said they did not have my number but they had heard my mother was from the island and that I still had family there. He asked if that was true, and if it was, whether I would be interested in playing for the country.”
He could not accept that first call-up — his club side were struggling in the league and were not inclined to let him depart at such short notice — but, this summer, he finally made it across the Atlantic. Now with Trencin, the
Slovakian champions, he made his international debut in June. “My grandmother was there to watch me, with a lot of other relatives,” he says. “It made them very happy, very proud.”
What Van Kessel found in Curaçao must count as one of world football’s least likely revolutions. The island has been a member of Fifa for only five years — until 2010, they played under the banner of the Netherlands Antilles — and it has not, it is fair to say, really intruded on the game’s consciousness. The Antilles last qualified for the Gold Cup, the regional championship, in 1973. They made the rather less illustrious Caribbean Cup three times in the past three decades. They did not win a game.
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Yet on Friday, Curaçao meet El Salvador in the third round of Concacaf’s labyrinthine World Cup qualifying process. They have already beaten Montserrat and Cuba. If they make it through, they will find themselves in the group stage, drawn alongside Mexico, Honduras and, most likely, Canada. It is an unprecedented success for a country of only 150,000 people, with little or no footballing pedigree, and it is down, in no small part, to the likes of Van Kessel and the dozen or so others who took up the invitation with him.
Country file
Capital: Willemstad
Population: 153,000
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Curaçao is part of the Kingdom of Holland — all Curaçao nationals have Dutch citizenship.
Until 2010, it was not a member of Fifa. Instead, they formed part of the Netherlands Antilles national side.
Neither Curaçao nor the Netherlands Antilles have much pedigree: they have not qualified for a Gold Cup, the regional championship, since 1973.
They are part of Concacaf, the North and Central American and Caribbean federation. There are five rounds of qualifying for three automatic spots and one play-off spot on the way to the World Cup. Curaçao start round three this week.
Several members of the Dutch national team — including Vurnon Anita, Ricardo van Rhijn and Jetro Willems — have Curaçaoan ancestry.
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Over the past few years, Curaçao’s football association has targeted a host of players, some of whom — like Van Kessel — were born in Holland to Curaçaoan families and others, such as Cuco Martina, of Southampton, who moved to Europe as infants. All have been offered the chance to play for the land of their parents’ birth. Darryl Lachman, of Sheffield Wednesday, Kemy Agustien, the former Swansea City midfield player, and a raft of others — playing in the Netherlands, Germany and Eastern Europe — have accepted.
When they face El Salvador, then, they will do so with a squad nurtured in some of the best leagues in Europe, giving them an experience and an education that few countries in the region can match. Even more remarkably, they will be managed by Patrick Kluivert, the former Ajax and Barcelona striker and Louis van Gaal’s assistant for Holland in last summer’s World Cup. Since his appointment 12 months ago, more and more players of Curaçaoan descent have been keen to sign up. When Kluivert agreed to take the job — on an informal contract, likely to expire as soon as their involvement in qualification is over — he declared that he had done so because he wanted to do “something special” for the country where his mother was born. All of a sudden, he is on the cusp of doing just that.
“At the start, nobody took us seriously,” Charlton Vicento, a former Holland youth striker now with Helmond Sport, says. Like Van Kessel, he was born in the Netherlands, in Zoetemeer. His father is from Curaçao. He was one of the first on the country’s radar, but delayed electing to play for them because he continued to harbour aspirations of representing Holland.
“I wanted to play a lot earlier, but my dad felt it was not the right choice,” he says. “When I was not selected for the Netherlands any more, I chose to say yes immediately.”
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He does not regret the decision. “Now we have come this far, people are enjoying our success,” he says. “It means a lot to the island. The whole world is following our results. There are cameras there during games: NOS, the Dutch national channel, flew all the way to Curaçao especially for us. Because of Patrick and because of our success, we are taken way more seriously.”
Challenges remain, of course. The quality of the infrastructure does not match the quality of the team. Players arriving from Europe have been required to stay in youth hostels because of a lack of money for accommodation. For the away trip to Montserrat, they had to travel by boat because the airstrip on the British Protectorate was too short for their plane to land. “The water was rough,” Kluivert said.
The team bus that transports them to training — Bob Marley blaring out of the stereo — has no windows. For one game, there were not enough matching socks for all 23 players. As Kluivert puts it, there is a need for “a little improvisation”. He admitted to the Curaçao Chronicle this year that he is in “a different world to the World Cup [with Holland], where everything was arranged to perfection”.
Those difficulties bring one significant benefit. None of the new recruits — no matter how distant their connection to the island — are anything less than fully committed; they would not travel halfway across the world to stay in a youth hostel if they saw it as a sinecure. “It means everything to play for my country,” Martina says. “It gives me a feeling I cannot describe.”
He has more of a link to Curaçao than most: he was born there, as were both of his parents, and he has been playing for them since he was 16. He was first called up for the under-21s. He “fell in love” with the island after his first international call-up.
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He does not doubt, though, that the more recent arrivals in the team share that passion. “Maybe the players who were born in Holland did not feel Curaçaoan the first time,” he says. “But after the second or third, they started to see it as one big family. They are not just playing for their country. It is a family thing now.”