Small Island, Big Impact: As Curaçao Heads to the World Cup, Future Goals Is Investing in What Comes Next

This summer, Curaçao’s national soccer team, The Blue Wave, will represent the smallest nation ever to qualify for the FIFA World Cup. Around the island, however, a buzzing sense of pride makes it feel like the other way around: the World Cup is coming to Curaçao. Games will be played thousands of miles away, but excitement is bursting at the seams in the Caribbean. Enthusiasm is spreading. Pride is swelling across the smallest nation ever to qualify for soccer’s biggest tournament.

It is as much a wonder as the island's famous underwater Blue Room Cave: how does a Caribbean island of fewer than 200,000 people earn a place on soccer's biggest stage? Statistically, the odds are slim. Yet this summer, Curaçao will do just that, turning what once seemed improbable into a source of island-wide celebration.

And Curaçao.

As Curaçao celebrates its historic World Cup qualification, the same spirit that carried the island to soccer's biggest stage is also helping protect its ocean and invest in its next generation.

The Next Blue Wave: Training Tomorrow's Players and Protectors

Go back to the months leading up to the June 2022 opening of Sandals Royal Curaçao. Team members at Sandals Resorts International are exploring the island for opportunities to lift the communities and enhance the environment. They come across Limpi Recycling. The founders, Debrah and Mitchell, launched Limpi after they met while studying Industrial product design in Holland.

Their studies focused on mass-producing plastic products, and they decided to use their product design knowledge to transform ocean plastic waste into keepsakes: keychains, coasters, and jewelry.

“Sandals Royal Curaçao wasn’t even open yet, but their team believed in our products and the benefit they could have on the island,” says Limpi co-founder Debrah Nijdam. “It paved the way for the Sandals Foundation to come along and donate machines to improve our recycling efficiency.”

Around the same time, the Sandals Foundation also began partnering with AFC Ajax, a renowned soccer club from the Netherlands. Ideas were swapped. Dots were connected. A giant vision was born for a program called Future Goals.

It would go like this:

Through the program, local “Future Coaches” receive specialized training and mentorship from AFC Ajax and then bring the eight-week curriculum into schools across the island, combining soccer instruction with lessons in environmental stewardship, teamwork and leadership.

While Curaçao prepares for its big moment in soccer history, Future Goals is ensuring the next generation has something equally important to play for and the tools to thrive. Children had been kicking soccer balls around fields for years, but the future would look different. Coaches from AFC Ajax now travel to schools across the island, providing eight weeks of professional soccer instruction alongside lessons in environmental stewardship.

They use two powerful visual aids to tie the lessons together: the beautiful ocean surrounding the island and the soccer goals Limpi creates from waste found in it.

A Celebration in Blue

It hasn't taken long for students to understand the connection, and the lessons go far beyond the classroom.

This year, students from more than 22 schools in the Future Goals program put those ideas into action by creating a large-scale public art installation at Kura Hulanda to celebrate Curaçao's historic World Cup qualification. Using recycled plastic waste and recovered ghost fishing nets, they transformed discarded materials into waves of blue and yellow, an island-wide tribute to both their national team and the environment they have learned to protect.

The installation gave students the opportunity to put the program’s core lesson into action by transforming waste into something meaningful, bringing communities together around a shared purpose, and demonstrating how small actions can create a lasting impact. Like the soccer goals standing on playgrounds across Curaçao, it serves as a reminder that something once discarded can become a source of pride and inspiration.

The dots connect all the way to the sense of community, pride, and possibility now sweeping across Curaçao as the island prepares for its World Cup moment.

A Cleaner Ocean, A Stronger Soccer Culture

The reefs are livelier. The island is cleaner. It’s been just four years since the Sandals Foundation, Limpi, and AFC Ajax came together to launch Future Goals. More than 7,500 pounds of plastic have been removed from the ocean. More than 3,000 square feet of ghost nets have been collected. The refuse has been the base of the formula to create 116 goals (and counting), with equipment and lessons reaching over 80% of the island’s primary schools and 5,345 children.

The presence of Future Goals has, overall, inspired an islandwide deeper love for soccer.

Visitors can experience the impact firsthand, as the Future Goals partnership has been extended through at least 2028. From the cockpit of a Mini Cooper, with roof down, follow a road from Sandals Royal Curaçao near the island’s easternmost point. Go around an ostrich farm and aloe vera farm, alongside beaches where divi-divi trees have sprung from the sand, in the direction of an 800-year-old kapok tree. No matter where you are on Curaçao, you’re never more than two miles from the ocean and always in its influence. The ride brings you to Limpi Recycling and, past that, the sound of joy in the distance.

On a brilliant Curaçaoan weekday, children stream from schoolrooms to playgrounds. This is their golden hour. Clusters of boys and girls hustle to the grassy fields they’ve learned to call “the pitch.” It’s a race to see who can put the first foot onto a waiting soccer ball, its bright colors beautifully scuffed from daily games. Every time a ball meets the back of a net, it creates a majestic “shushing” sound, similar to ocean water brushing against the beach.

In these moments, everything connects. The ocean and net. The environment and goal posts. Fun and responsibility. The resort and the communities. Children and the future.

Even before the World Cup begins, Curaçao has already won.