Curaçao

The Story

Curaçao is an island roughly the size of Austin's inner loop, 40 miles off the coast of Venezuela, with a population of about 150,000. It is not an independent country — it's a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which is the tidy Dutch way of saying the island runs its own affairs while sharing a king, a passport, and a national soccer federation that until about 2011 wasn't even a standalone FIFA member.

This summer, Curaçao becomes the smallest country by population ever to play in a men's World Cup.

They got here by winning every match in their initial CONCACAF group, then finishing above Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago in the second round — the Jamaica match a 0-0 draw in November that mathematically sealed qualification. Fred Rutten, the Dutch coach who took over after Guus Hiddink stepped down for health reasons, inherited a squad built almost entirely of dual-passport Dutch-Caribbean professionals: Leandro and Juninho Bacuna in midfield, Columbus Crew goalkeeper Eloy Room in goal, Jurgen Locadia up front, Cuco Martina in defense. Most were born in the Netherlands. All of them chose the island.

Group E is Germany, Ecuador, and Côte d'Ivoire. Nobody on the planet is picking Curaçao to advance. That is, in a strange way, the point. The island already won.

3 Players to Know

Leandro Bacuna

The 34-year-old captain, born and raised in Groningen in the Netherlands to Curaçaoan parents, who spent his prime at Aston Villa and Cardiff City in the English leagues and is now back at his hometown FC Groningen for the final stretch of his career. He led Curaçao with three assists in qualifying. Bacuna is the player who decided — like most of this squad — that a Dutch passport and a career in English football didn't have to mean playing for the Netherlands. He is the bridge between the Eredivisie and a Caribbean island of 150,000 that just qualified for a World Cup.

Eloy Room

The 37-year-old goalkeeper and the player most DFW-area soccer fans will actually recognize — Room has been the starting keeper for the Columbus Crew in MLS since 2019, won the 2020 and 2023 MLS Cups with them, and is known in the league as one of the best shot-stoppers on a tight budget. Born in Nijmegen, Netherlands. The oldest player in Curaçao's squad and probably the most important — with a back line this young, everything runs through him.

Juninho Bacuna

Leandro's younger brother, 28, a box-to-box midfielder currently at Turkish club Fatih Karagümrük after stints at Huddersfield, Rangers, and Birmingham City in the English and Scottish leagues. Led Curaçao in duels won across the entire qualifying campaign — the team's engine. The Bacuna brothers playing in the same midfield at a World Cup is the kind of family-story-as-national-story that only tiny nations produce, and it's exactly what a 150,000-person country looks like when it builds a soccer team.

The Food

Signature Dish

Keshi yena is the national dish and the best thing to ever happen to a wheel of Gouda. A hollowed-out Edam or Gouda is stuffed with spiced, stewed meat (usually chicken, sometimes goat, often studded with raisins, olives, capers, and a whisper of nutmeg), then baked until the cheese melts down around the filling like a savory volcano. It's a Dutch colonial artifact reinvented by enslaved Africans using the cheese rinds their enslavers discarded. On the side: funchi (cornmeal polenta, grilled or fried), pan batí (a thick coconut-tinged pancake), stoba (slow-cooked stew — kabritu stoba, the goat version, is the one to order), and a glass of awa di lamunchi, the island's spiced lime drink.

Where to Eat in DFW

Real talk: there is no Curaçaoan restaurant in DFW. There is no Curaçaoan restaurant in Texas. For Dutch-Caribbean cooking, you'd need to fly to Amsterdam or Willemstad. Closest substitutes: Aldeez Afribbean Restaurant & Lounge in Dallas for the Caribbean-African overlap (jerk, oxtail, the spice profile is in the same family), Heroes Lounge for a proper reggae-bar match-day, or Caribbean Cabana downtown if you want something walkable. For the keshi-yena angle specifically, try ordering baked cheese at any Dutch-leaning European spot and improvise. Honest recommendation: find the Dutch consulate's watch party or a Curaçaoan diaspora meet-up on match day — there are more Curaçaoans in DFW than you'd think, and they will feed you.

Fan Culture

Curaçaoan supporters are outnumbered in every stadium they enter, and they do not care. The flag is blue with a yellow stripe and two white stars — the small one for Klein Curaçao, the island off the coast — and it will be everywhere. Expect tumba blasting from portable speakers: fast, drum-driven carnival music descended from enslaved African rhythms and named for the conga that drives it, with a cowbell layered on top. Expect the language to flip between Papiamentu (the island's Creole — a blend of Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and West African languages spoken by almost nobody outside the Dutch Caribbean), Dutch, Spanish, and English in the same sentence. Expect rum. Expect strangers to invite you to a barbecue whose address they haven't decided on yet.