QUINCY, Mass. — Cape Verde will play in the FIFA World Cup for the first time in 2026. The team qualified to play on soccer’s largest stage across North America later this summer.
The “Blue Sharks” qualified for the tournament in the fall of 2025 after defeating Eswatini. After the match ended, the players and coaches celebrated on the pitch. They were wearing celebratory shirts designed by a man in Quincy.
“I’m seeing the shirts on BBC because the athletes are running around with the shirts,” Alex Figueiredo said. “Seeing it on networks across the world in different languages. They don’t know that a small brand from Quincy, Massachusetts, just made that.”
Figueiredo was born in Cape Verde and moved to the Boston area as a teenager. Since 2018, he and his cousin, Felipe Soares, have designed and created shirts for their ISLNDZ clothing brand.
Figueiredo used his graphic design skills from high school classes to create different shirts, hoodies, and pants. He’s an engineer for his day job. At night, he focuses on his passion project and prints the apparel from a press about ten feet away from the dinner table in his apartment.
He and his cousins loved apparel and would get excited when soccer superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo dropped new releases. Growing up, Figueiredo never thought he’d design stuff that the historic soccer team would wear.
“The sense of pride that came from all of that. I’ve never felt that in my life as a Cape Verdean. Not in my wildest dreams would I have pictured that scenario to play out the way it did.”
ISLNDZ has since shipped orders all over the world. They’ve created shirts for fans of the soccer team since 2020. He hopes he is able to design their uniforms in the future.
“To build something that’s actually worn during a game would be amazing,” he said.
The apparel line created the Olympic Village outfits for several Cape Verde Olympians who performed in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, France. That was the brand’s first big milestone.
David de Pina earned the bronze medal in boxing that summer. It was Cape Verde’s first medal ever won in the Olympics. De Pina wore ISLNDZ apparel while he was on the medal stand.
“The two biggest moments in Cape Verde sports we were there with the country,” Figueiredo said.
Another brand designed the kits the Cape Verde team will wear at the World Cup, but the jerseys will have the crest that Figueiredo created. The team has featured that logo for the past six years.
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