Roberto ‘Pico’ Lopes: From Bank Desk to World Cup Stardom
On another life’s timeline, Roberto ‘Pico’ Lopes would be sitting behind a desk in Dublin this week, weighing up interest rates instead of Edinson Cavani’s movement. A mortgage advisor in a quiet Irish branch, not a centre-back preparing to face Uruguay at a World Cup.
Football – and one phone call from Shamrock Rovers – tore up that script.
Back in 2017, Lopes was juggling a full-time job in a bank with part-time football at Bohemians in the League of Ireland. Solid defender, good pro, but hardly a name you’d pencil into a World Cup squad list. Then Rovers, the richer and more ambitious neighbours across the city, offered him a professional contract. He walked away from the safety of a steady wage and bet everything on the game.
Seven years later, the gamble looks inspired.
On Monday, the 34-year-old produced a standout defensive display in Cape Verde’s 0-0 draw with European champions Spain, a performance that belonged on this stage. Calm on the ball, aggressive in the duels, utterly unfazed by the names in front of him. The African island nation of just 525,000 people announced itself on the tournament; Lopes, in many ways, was its face.
The World Cup has dragged him into a different orbit. He has popped up on US television, part of the global curiosity around a volcanic archipelago daring to mix it with the giants. Born in Ireland to Cape Verdean father Carlos and Irish mother Judy, Lopes has become the unlikely bridge between Crumlin and Praia.
He even found himself on James Corden’s World Cup show on Fox. For a man who once spent his days discussing loan terms, it felt surreal. As he put it, it was “the stuff of dreams.”
The route to this point, though, hinged on a message he almost ignored.
Back in 2018, then Cape Verde coach Rui Águas sent Lopes a note on LinkedIn. It was written in Portuguese. Lopes, busy with life and suspicious of anything that looked too good to be true, didn’t exactly rush to translate it. When he finally did, with the help of Google Translate, the opportunity of a lifetime stared back at him.
By then, nine months had passed.
Águas followed up, asking if he had considered the offer to join the national team. Lopes, mortified, scrambled to put it right.
“He said they were interested in getting new players into the national team and asked if it would be of interest,” Lopes told AFP in 2024. “I said absolutely and apologized profusely, and that if the opportunity was still there, I would love to be a part of it.”
He had thought it might be a prank. Of course he had.
“I grew up in an era of prank phone calls and prank messages so I was always a bit skeptical,” he told the Irish Sun. “I never thought an international call-up would come that way.”
It did. And everything changed.
Since his debut in 2019, Lopes has gone to two Africa Cup of Nations, helping Cape Verde reach the quarter-finals in the 2023 edition, and now he stands at the summit of a footballer’s career: a World Cup.
His display against Spain rippled far beyond the stadium in Atlanta. Several generations of his family were watching, scattered across continents. In Cape Verde, his 98-year-old grandfather followed every moment. In the stands, his parents and two brothers sat alongside his wife Leah and baby son Diego.
Diego, naturally, slept through most of it.
“He (Diego) slept through most of the match -- it shows you how boring Spain was,” Lopes joked.
While the defender has lived inside the sealed world of a World Cup camp, his family has felt the full force of Cape Verde’s pride. On the streets, they have been stopped, recognised, embraced.
“They’ve seen us on TV, they’ve been approaching us on the street saying, ‘We recognize you’, all the way from Crumlin, can you believe it?” Judy told RTE. The little pocket of Dublin that raised him now feels woven into Cape Verde’s story.
Lopes, though, has never fully let go of that other life. He is still glad he went to college in Dublin, still glad he built a safety net.
“If I didn’t go to college or I didn’t pursue education, I wouldn’t have known what LinkedIn was,” he told The Irish Sun. “Your education is just as important.
“I’ve been able to balance (the job and football) and then get to a stage where I’ve left employment to go to full-time football.”
Even before that, before Shamrock Rovers and league titles, before LinkedIn messages and Google Translate, the dream had already taken root. In 2013, watching Cape Verde at their first-ever Africa Cup of Nations, he allowed himself to wonder.
“I am a dreamer. You watch anything yourself . . . ‘Could that be me? I wonder if that would ever happen to me?’”
Thirteen years on, the answer is written across the biggest tournament in the sport. Five Irish titles with Shamrock Rovers, two AFCONs, now a World Cup where he has gone toe-to-toe with Spain and is about to face Uruguay.
The mortgage advisor who almost missed his international call-up because he thought it was a joke now walks out at the ‘Beautiful Game’s’ showpiece, carrying the hopes of a tiny island nation and a Dublin neighbourhood that suddenly feels a lot closer to the World Cup than anyone ever imagined.
