Just as Ecuador has its “valley of longevity” in Vilcabamba, a town where many people live past the age of 100, its national soccer team keeps its best secret in Esmeraldas — one of the country’s smallest and most neglected provinces, born from a shipwreck and transformed into its largest factory of footballers.

Thursday’s 2-1 victory over Germany, the most significant in Ecuadorian history, is the product of its best generation of players — William Pacho, Champions League winner with Paris Saint-Germain; Moisés Caicedo, FIFA Club World Cup winner with Chelsea; and Piero Hincapié, Premier League champion with Arsenal — and of Esmeraldas, a region that contains barely 3% of Ecuador’s population yet supplies nearly 40% of the squad taking part in the 2026 World Cup. With roughly 600,000 inhabitants out of a national total of 18 million, towns and cities such as San Mateo de las Esmeraldas, Quinindé, San Lorenzo and Eloy Alfaro were the birthplace of 10 of the 26 players who have already secured spots in the World Cup round of 16.

Absent from World Cups throughout the 20th century, Ecuador became a regular participant from 2002 onward. Since then it has played at five World Cups and missed only two. In its last four appearances — 2002, 2006, 2014 and 2022 — Esmeraldas was the province that contributed the most players, according to local website Primicias: eight in South Korea–Japan 2002, nine in Brazil 2014 and 10 in Qatar 2022 and 2026.

Lying on the country’s northwest Pacific coast and bordering Colombia, Esmeraldas is the eighth most populous province in Ecuador, but its principal cradle of athletes extends beyond soccer to basketball players and track athletes. The Ecuadorian footballer’s biotype — tall, muscular, lean, fast, agile and dark-skinned — is far more concentrated among Esmeraldas’s Afro-descendant population than among the rest of the country.

With no teams in the first division — a privilege reserved mainly for clubs from Guayaquil and Quito — Esmeraldas supplies 10 players to the squad competing at the 2026 World Cup. Four started in the historic 2-1 win over Germany, including two of the season’s standout defenders in Europe: Hincapié and Pacho. Nilson Angulo (a winger for Sunderland and scorer of the opener) and Enner Valencia (a forward for Pachuca) also started. Pervis Estupiñán (Milan) and Félix Torres (Inter, Brazil) later came on. The local pride list is completed by Jackson Porozo, Yaimar Medina, Alan Minda and Denil Castillo.

The most populous province, Guayas — whose capital is Guayaquil, the country’s largest industrial and coastal city — follows on coach Beccacece’s roster with six players, including Gonzalo Plata, the Flamengo forward who scored Ecuador’s second goal against Germany. By contrast, Pichincha, which contains the national capital Quito, has no representatives in 2026. Moisés Caicedo, Chelsea’s standout player, is one of only three squad members born in the highlands of the Andes.

The phenomenon is not limited to the national team. In Ecuador’s 2019 domestic league, for example, 119 players came from Esmeraldas, 92 from Guayas and 35 from Pichincha.

The main source of Ecuadorian footballers is a poor region with a low quality of life that suffers the country’s lowest human development indices. It is there that a majority of Afro-descendants are concentrated — a feature rare elsewhere in Ecuador: 50% of Esmeraldas’s population are children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of zambos and mulatos who identify as Afro-Ecuadorian, a proportion far higher than the national average of 7%.

While the demographic history of the rest of Ecuador is a mix of Indigenous peoples and Europeans that produced a predominantly mestizo majority, Esmeraldas was populated by Africans, beginning with a 16th-century shipwreck: a vessel carrying enslaved people from Panama ran aground off its coast. Many survivors took refuge in the jungle, where they established communities and joined Indigenous groups in a region that was very difficult for Spanish colonizers to access and control. In that geographic isolation would be born the secret of Ecuadorian football.

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