Curaçao

Curaçao's national side first took the field in 2011, picking up the fixtures and the federation that had belonged to the Netherlands Antilles before that country ceased to exist a year earlier. Players who might once have represented the larger union now had a single flag to choose, and a good number of them had never set foot on the island as children, having come up instead through youth academies in the Netherlands.

That split background has defined the squad more than any tactic. Leandro Bacuna captains the side; Juninho Bacuna, Cuco Martina and Eloy Room followed a similar path, opting for Curaçao over the country where they were coached as boys. Rangelo Janga, Gino van Kessel, Sherel Floranus and Roly Bonevacia came through the same Dutch pipeline.

The team won the Caribbean Cup in 2017 and has reached the Gold Cup finals stage four times since, in 2017, 2019, 2021 and 2023. None of that prepared the island for what came next. Under coach Dick Advocaat, Curaçao qualified for the 2026 World Cup, its first appearance at the tournament, and did so as the smallest nation by population ever to reach a men's World Cup finals.

It is a distance measured from that first match in 2011, when a side assembled from a dissolved federation and a scattering of Dutch academies had no tournament pedigree of its own to point to.