Among the many players who will participate in the African Championship that will open next week will also be Roberto Lopez, a defensive player for the Cape Verde team.
This is not a big star.
Very far from Muhammad Salah, Sadio Mana, Riyadh Mahraz and others.
Lopes comes from the Irish Shamrock Rovers, he is called "Pico" and he is a reasonable player and nothing more.
However, the road he made from Ireland to the continental championship is one of the most fascinating stories in world football.
A story about opportunism, luck and coincidence.
Lopez, a native of Ireland, began his career at the local Bohemians.
He was one of the pillars of the defense, and at the time was playing for the young Ireland team alongside John Egan, a Sheffield United player.
Although his team was at the top, it did not have the resources to pay players enough salaries for a full-time job.
So, in addition to football, the young brake went for a secure office job.
He completed an inheritance counseling course and began working mornings at a bank in his hometown of Dublin.
In 2017, when he was 25, he received an offer from his great rival Shamrock, who also did not promise much money.
"I just wanted to be happy in football for a few more years," he told the Irish Times why he accepted the offer.
"I did not want to worry about financial matters. I believed that everything would work out."
At first, everything actually fell apart.
A few months after signing for Shamrock, Lopes woke up with severe pain in his testicles.
He hoped it would go away, but the pain got worse and he went to the doctor.
The diagnosis was quick.
Lopez suffered from a testicle and had an eight-hour window to deal with the problem before things got worse.
"Out of pain I drove to the hospital with one leg out the window," he recalled of the dramatic moments that ended in good news.
Lopes was operated on, recovered and returned to the pitches.
He helped Shamrock qualify for the European factories and won the Irish Cup with her, but even in those good days he did not imagine the possibility of him becoming an international player and more in an African team.
All thanks to LinkedIn
In 2016, while still playing for the Bohemians, López collaborated with Aiman bin Muhammad, an extreme leftist born in England to an Irish mother and a Tunisian father, who had just been called up to the Tunisian national team for the first time. The two were good friends, so much so that Lopez allowed himself to burst into an interview with Ben Muhammad to declare: "The truth is that I too can play for an African team." Lopez did not laugh - he was born in Ireland, but his father comes from Cape Verde. This remark generated a little giggle and nothing more, but a journalist who was there and heard it decided to take it as a personal project.
Time passed, Lopes was not called up to any team, and this story could have ended here.
But in one of his difficult times, when he was trying to figure out which direction his career was going, Lopez opened a LinkedIn account.
He did not peek at it at all for years, until one day he decided to check out what was going on in it.
"I opened up and saw a message from Cape Verde national team coach Roy Angus, written in Portuguese," Lopez said. "I thought it was spam, so I did not comment."
It was only after nine months that he received another message from Angus, who wrote to him: "Well, did you manage to think about my offer?".
Lopes was pressed.
He copied the contents of the first message, passed it on to Google Translate and discovered very late that he had in fact been called up to the Cape Verde squad.
"I was insane, I really wanted to get on the team already," he said, and after responding in the affirmative, the absorption process began.
When the paperwork was over in 2019, López flew to Marseille and joined his new friends in a warm-up game against Togo, where he discovered that he did not know a word of Portuguese and that the journey was not going to be easy.
"Cape Verde has always been part of my identity, and now I intend to explore the culture and roots of the place," he explained, and did so.
When required to sing in front of the actors at the initiation ceremony, he gave up a Drake song and found a local song on Spotify that he memorized.
"I was probably mistaken in words, but it helped me adapt," he said.
Adaptation has also been completed on the grass.
López played in all the World Cup qualifiers for Cape Verde, which gave Fayette to Nigeria but was left out.
Now, ahead of the African Championships, he allows himself to set big goals for his team, which will play in House A with Burkina Faso, Ethiopia and Cameroon.
"We want to get through the houses stage and then see where we get to," he told the BBC.
"Our goal is to surprise as many as possible."
In his case, not at all sure it could be more surprising.
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