As a child, Pedro Leitão Brito, Bubista, began to dream of seeing himself in a World Cup in the summer of 1982. The first television appeared on the Cape Verde island of Boa Vista, where he was born 56 years ago. The owner charged admission to his house to watch the World Cup matches played in Spain and he and his friends invented ways to sneak in without paying. Until he located them and kicked them out. “At that time I began to understand what I wanted for my life,” he said. “I wanted to reach the big stages of football.” And it has arrived: 44 years later he debuts in a World Cup as coach of . Precisely against Spain, the country where he also reached the highest level in his career as a footballer.
One of the first people to connect that young soccer player with the coach of one of the four debuting teams in this tournament was Félix Castillo, president of the tournament in the nineties. “I was surprised when I read that he was the coach,” he says. He signed him in December 1995 to reinforce the squad of a team that was fighting for promotion from Second to First.
The coach, the Englishman Colin Addison, had requested pieces for the midfield, and Paco Herrera, the technical secretary, appeared with Bubista, for whom he did not pay a transfer fee, and to whom they awarded a salary of five million pesetas, 30,000 euros. Until Bubista appeared with his dreadlocks, they had seen few foreign players there, just a few Russians and Yugoslavs. He arrived after a sidereal leap: from the 26 degrees of tropical Cape Verde, where he played, to the Extremaduran winter. “He integrated very well,” recalls Juan Antonio Rodríguez, Rodri, the captain of that team. “The club was like a family, with people from home.”
“He was a defensive pivot who could play as a center back. Thin, but very wiry, just over 1.80. He was very strong. He stood out in the defensive aspect and was very good with his head,” says Rodri. “Although he wasn’t a very good player,” Castillo completes. He also encountered competition from Sala, which barely left him room to play two games.
That 95/96 season was one of Badajoz’s most brilliant. They fought until the last day to play for promotion, but the position went to Extremadura by a single goal, which ended up going up. That dream disappeared, and so did Bubista’s European illusion, who felt far from the football level of Spain and decided to return to Africa, to play in Angola.
Along the way he was international with Cape Verde and when he retired he served as assistant coach in two periods, until he assumed the main position in 2020. And Bubista, who had tried elite football leaving the archipelago, became the unifier of a dispersed talent that took the opposite path. Their team is made up mostly of footballers with Cape Verdean family roots, but born in places like the Netherlands, France, Portugal, Ireland, Turkey and Cyprus.
The small archipelago, with only 600,000 inhabitants, applied itself to the search for selectable players trained in European football, in more demanding contexts than the island competitions in which Bubista learned. They qualified for the first time to play in the Africa Cup in 2021 and in the 2023 edition they reached the quarterfinals. That year, in addition, they began the long and uncertain path to the tournament in which they are about to debut.
The greatest dream of Cape Verdean soccer fans was also the aspiration of the boy Bubista who sneaked into the house of the owner of the only television on his island to watch the World Cup matches in Spain, the country where he played as a professional years later. And against Spain, precisely, that improbable dream is going to play today.
