Eloy Room spent last year training alone. Now he’s Curacao’s World Cup hero

When he stirs from his slumber this morning, Eloy Room can be excused if his first impulse is to wonder whether it was all a dream.

Is he really playing at the World Cup, having spent much of last year without a club and training on his own? Did Curacao, the smallest nation ever to qualify for the tournament, really draw against Ecuador? Did he really make 15 saves, equalling Tim Howard’s record? Did he really joke, in a post-match interview, that after his heroics, “I need a statue in Curacao now”? Did he and his team-mates really end up dancing in their dressing room with King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands?

Royal Celebration with the King and Queen 💙@koninklijkhuis pic.twitter.com/PLLrVoek80

— Curaçao National Football Team (@TheBlueWaveFFK) June 21, 2026

All of that happened at Arrowhead Stadium on what Room called “the greatest night of my career”. It started inside two minutes with a superb save to deny Ecuador’s veteran forward Enner Valencia from close range and, from that point, it became a story of save after save after save as Curacao secured a precious 0-0 draw.

The 37 year old was asked afterwards what specifically he expects to remember when he looks back in years to come. “I think in 40 years, I’ll still remember,” he told reporters. “It’s going to be an insane memory. You don’t think about it when you’re doing it, but of course it’s going to be something you look back to. As a goalkeeper, it is almost the perfect game.”

Almost? Room didn’t put a foot wrong. After the early stop, there followed a run of mostly comfortable saves, but the 10th was excellent, diving low to his right to keep out Valencia’s downward header. From that point, like Cape Verde’s Vozinha against Spain last Monday, the goalkeeper looked unbeatable.

The word he kept coming back to, across a range of post-match interviews, was “journey”. He spoke about the journey that has taken Curacao to the World Cup — an extraordinary achievement for a country with a population of just over 150,000 — and how he had decided, having represented the Netherlands at under-20 level, to switch allegiance to the land of his father’s birth.

There is cynicism in some quarters about the number of players at this World Cup who have, under dual nationality regulations, been called up for nations other than where they were born.

But Room has been on this journey since 2015, signing up after the great Dutch forward Patrick Kluivert, whose mother was born in Curacao, took over as the national team’s head coach. Kluivert didn’t stay long, but Room did, spending his international weeks travelling to the Caribbean and back, entering CONCACAF’s laborious World Cup qualifying competition at the first stage, playing for a team slowly building its way up from the lower reaches of FIFA’s rankings.

“My dream was to play in the World Cup for Curacao,” he told reporters. “That was my only goal. I knew back then it was a long road. People called me crazy when I switched from Holland (the Netherlands) to Curacao, but I had a goal in mind. Now I’m here, and I think I was right.”

For a time, Curacao was all that, professionally, Room had. After spells with Vitesse (twice) and PSV Eindhoven in the Netherlands and Columbus Crew in the U.S., he was released by Belgian club Cercle Brugge in the summer of 2025 and, despite an impressive CV, was left without a club. For months he trained on his own back in the Netherlands. He wanted to find a club — and eventually signed for Miami FC, in the second-tier USL Championship — but his main objective was to get to the World Cup. Against the odds, he and Curacao did.

Well deserved. 👏
A match to remember for our one and only Eloy Room. 🧤🌎

— Miami FC (@TheMiamiFC) June 21, 2026

On his first World Cup appearance, against Germany in Houston, he was beaten seven times. Most of Curacao’s players appeared to take that setback with a smile, but Room took it personally. Noting what Vozinha and Cape Verde did against Spain a few days later, he took it out on Ecuador.

“I have a former (Columbus Crew) team-mate, Steven Moreira, who plays for Cape Verde and I’m in touch with him,” Room said. “We support each other, the small islands, and that was the game of the goalkeeper (Vozinha), so I was, like, ‘I can do that too’. I showed today that I can also do it.”

Vozinha made seven saves for Cape Verde against Spain. Room made 15 against Ecuador, which, according to Opta (though not FIFA, who go with 16), equalled the World Cup record set by former U.S. goalkeeper Howard against Belgium in 2014. “I remember that game,” Room said. “I knew it was a lot. I’m a little bit annoyed that I didn’t break the record, but I think Tim Howard was sweating in front of the TV because I was close.”

Howard might have been anxious, but Curacao’s supporters, the so-called “Blue Wave”, loved it. So did the king and queen, who, having been in Houston earlier in the day to watch the Netherlands’ 5-1 victory over Sweden, flew to Kansas City to watch Curacao (which has remained part of the Dutch kingdom since becoming an autonomous country in 2010).

“They were so happy and so proud and we got a lot of congratulations from them,” Room said. “They were even dancing in our locker room with the music. That’s our vibe. There’s a lot of dancing.”

The videos soon appeared on social media and, on that subject, Room went into last night’s game with around 100,000 followers on Instagram. By midnight local time he was beyond 700,000. That surge isn’t on the scale of Vozinha last week, but it is another reminder of just how a big performance at a World Cup can see a player’s profile transformed overnight.

Do Room and his team-mates have one more big performance in them against Ivory Coast in Philadelphia on Thursday? If they do, Curacao’s remarkable journey could yet continue into the World Cup knockout stage. In so many ways, it is the stuff of dreams.