On Friday, July 3, 2026, a nation of just half a million people almost knocked the world champions out of the FIFA World Cup. There are two stories in that game, and a good leader needs to understand both.
My daughter is in high school. Like many, she doesn’t usually follow soccer but becomes a fan during the World Cup. On Friday night, she looked up from the couch and said something I can’t stop thinking about.
“I’m always going to remember this guy’s name. Vozinha. It’s burned into my brain forever.”
Will she still remember it when she’s ninety and can’t find her keys? Probably not. But that’s not what matters. What matters is that a 40-year-old goalkeeper from a country most Americans can’t find on a map made an impression in my living room in suburban Chicago that a teenager says will last forever.
Let me first retell the story the way most people are sharing it: from the scrappy underdog’s perspective.
Then I’ll tell you the same story a second way, because that version is even more important for leaders.
The Team That Lost, and Won Anyway
Cabo Verde is a group of islands off the coast of West Africa. The whole country has fewer people than a mid-sized American city. This was their first World Cup. They went undefeated in the group stage. On Friday, they were in Miami, facing Argentina, the defending champions with Lionel Messi, one of soccer’s all-time greats.
On paper, it should have been ugly. They were given a less-than-5 % chance of winning by the oddsmakers.
For long stretches, Cabo Verde was outplayed.
And they took the champions to extra time anyway.
They fell behind. They equalized. They fell behind again. They equalized again — with a curling shot that may be the greatest goal their country has ever scored. In the end, they lost, 3–2. And the winning goal wasn’t even a clean Argentine strike. It was an own goal, a cruel deflection in the 111th minute.
At the center of it all was goalkeeper Vozinha. He’s forty years old. His real name is Josimar Dias. “Vozinha” is a childhood nickname that means “little granny,” given by older kids who would knock him down and joke that he’d go home crying to his grandmother. He spent twenty years as an unknown, moving between small clubs in Angola, Moldova, Cyprus, and Slovakia. He spent recent years playing in Portugal’s second division. And there he was, at an age when most goalkeepers have retired, stopping Argentina again and again.
The goalkeeper is the one position the soccer scoreboard is actually about. It counts the balls that get past him. That’s the job. By that measure, Vozinha lost.
Fall seven times, stand up eight.
– Japanese proverb
The scoreboard recorded the loss. But it couldn’t capture what Vozinha did.
But it couldn’t measure the mark he left on the memory of an American teenager. Millions of new fans overnight. A whole country that will see itself differently for a generation. None of that shows up in “Argentina 3, Cabo Verde 2.”
If you’ve seen the first Rocky movie, you know this feeling. Rocky doesn’t win the fight. But he lasts all the rounds when nobody thought he could, and by the final bell, the scorecard doesn’t matter much. He creates something the judges aren’t counting.
If you lead anything, whether it’s a team, a unit, a committee, or a change no one asked you to lead, you will lose sometimes. The coalition might fall apart. The culture change you’re working on might take years rather than months. The pushback might go nowhere this quarter, leaving you wondering why you tried.
Punch above your weight anyway.
Because you get through it. You learn from it. And you build things the scoreboard can’t measure, like credibility, trust, and a team that saw you keep trying when it was tough. That’s not just a consolation prize. That’s the foundation you’ll win from next time.
The Same Game, From the Other Bench
Now here’s the second, less commonly retold, but more important story.
It’s the story of a winner’s mistake. So almost nobody is telling it.
Argentina almost lost.
The world champions nearly got knocked out by a team ranked 67th. And if you watched, you know why. They played like a team that assumed the result was already decided.
The part that should stop us all cold? They had already learned this exact lesson.
Four years ago, in 2022, Argentina began its World Cup run by losing to 51st-ranked Saudi Arabia — one of the biggest upsets the tournament had ever seen. The oddsmakers gave Saudi Arabia roughly the same steep odds as Cabo Verde this year. Argentina played it casually enough that three consecutive goals were ruled offside. And eventually lost the game. But then they went on to win the championship.
Winning changes how you remember your journey, your history. It covers up your flaws. Argentina probably remembers its 2022 run as “we always find a way,” not as “anyone can beat us if we’re too comfortable.” The near-disaster was forgotten in the wake of the trophy that followed. The memory changed, even if the knowledge stayed.
Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.
–Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, and Peter Rinearson in The Road Ahead (1995)
You see this happen in organizations. And it looks like a good team telling itself a good story.
A healthcare organization survives a crisis — a sentinel event, a brutal survey, a near-miss that stayed out of the papers. And the story it tells afterward is a proud one. “We pulled together. We’re resilient. We handled it.” That story feels like learning. It lets everyone file the event under ‘handled’ instead of under ‘here are the exact conditions that will produce the next one’. The recovery story eats the prevention.
Recall Kodak for a moment. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975. But they largely ignored it. Partly because film was still winning, making loads of money. And partly because it didn’t fit with their story, their core identity as a chemicals company. So they slowly walked off a cliff they could see coming. That wasn’t ignorance. They knew better. The decline happened because continuing to win with film allowed them to paper over the threat to their business and the fact that they already owned the solution.
So if you’re leading something that’s winning right now, the question isn’t whether you’re smart enough. You clearly are.
The question is: What flaws is your success hiding?
Is it your culture? The things you now tolerate because you’ve “made it”?
Is it your incentives? Maybe you get rewarded for the metric that’s already green on a dashboard, but not for the effort that keeps it green.
Or is it something more basic: What story did you stop telling yourself because you won the last time?
You Are Both Teams
Here’s why you have to watch the same game twice.
You aren’t just Cabo Verde or Argentina. You’re both, at the same time, right now.
Compared to the C-suite, the system, or people with more power than you, you’re Cabo Verde. You’re under-resourced, outranked, and fighting against the odds. You need enough of that underdog spirit to keep going when the scoreboard says you can’t win.
But compared to your own team, like the nurses at the frontline, the new hire who notices what you’ve stopped seeing, or the resident watching how you handle mistakes, you’re Argentina. You’re the favorite, and the one most at risk of thinking the game is already won. Most at risk of believing that you’re too big and too strong to fail.
The best leaders can hold both roles at once.
They have enough grit to keep going when they’re outmatched, and enough humility to never take a win for granted.
The One Practice
Take your most recent real win. The project that landed. The crisis you got through. The metric that finally turned green.
Now watch it from the other bench.
Ask yourself one question: What story does winning allow me to forget?
Then, and this is the hard part, find the person on your team most likely to know the answer and ask them directly. Not the person who will agree with you, but the one who notices what you’ve stopped seeing.
The underdog story is the one that gets the headlines. It’s inspiring, and it’s true.
But the story from the other bench, the quiet one about the champion who almost lost because winning made them stop paying attention, is the one that keeps you in the game long enough to make a difference.
