This post was originally published on Politico.

If you want to trace Cape Verde’s emergence as a soccer power, you might go back to 2009, when the country beat Portugal on its way to a gold medal at the Jogos de Lusofonia.

The Lusofonia Games were a junior varsity Olympics for remnants of a common empire, an effort by the 12-country Association of Olympic Committees of Portuguese-Speaking Countries to mimic the Commonwealth Games or Jeux de la Francophonie, an upstart competition for former French colonies. On its face, all of these competitions were an experiment in geographically unlikely camaraderie — could tae kwon do artists from Equatorial

Author: By Sasha Issenberg