Roberto Lopes hails from Crumlin on the southside of Dublin and, like most Dubliners, he has tales to tell.
There is one story in particular Lopes has been asked to repeat dozens of times in the past four years. The pride-filled rise in his voice as he recounts it to The Athletic, even after a bleep test and double training session with Shamrock Rovers, the League of Ireland side he has played as a centre-back for since 2017, tells a tale of its own.
Lopes, now 32, was 28 when his life changed. It started when former Benfica and Porto striker Rui Aguas, then manager of Cape Verde’s national team, directly messaged Lopes on the professional networking platform LinkedIn. Aguas knew of Lopes’ Cape Verdean roots, with his father Carlos having grown up on the island of Sao Nicolau.
The message was a straightforward invitation to represent the island nation situated 350 miles off the west coast of Africa in the Atlantic Ocean. The only thing was it was written in Portuguese and Lopes says he mistook it for the kind of “thanks for connecting” note that LinkedIn users typically send to each other, and thought nothing more of it.
Nine months later, in 2019, Aguas messaged again: this time in English to ask if Lopes had given the invitation any thought.
“I did what I should have done the first time and copied and pasted the message into Google Translate,” says Lopes. “It said: ‘We’re looking to get players into the national team, would this be of interest?’. Straight away, I apologised profusely, saying: ‘Please excuse my ignorance and lack of Portuguese, but I’d love to be a part of the group’. Thankfully, he came straight back to me and said: ‘We would love to have you’.”
Four weeks later, Lopes travelled to France to play in his first international friendlies against Togo and Ligue 1 side Marseille. He has gone on to earn 36 caps in total and played at the Africa Cup of Nations in January 2022 as Cape Verde reached the last 16.
“We went out to (eventual champions) Senegal, Sadio Mane (who scored the opening goal), and a bout of food poisoning which finished half the team off,” he says of his side’s 2-0 defeat in Cameroon.
Two years later, Cape Verde went one better by reaching the last eight. They beat Ghana and drew with Egypt to finish top of Group B, but their memorable journey reached its ending when South Africa goalkeeper Ronwen Williams saved four penalties during a quarter-final shootout.
“To test yourself at that level is all you want to do as a kid,” says Lopes. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for LinkedIn, and it goes much deeper than the opportunity to play football.
“My dad got to see me play for Cape Verde at home in a World Cup qualifier. He had a Cape Verde jersey on and everyone was asking him where he got it as they are hard to get. When he said his son played for the team, he was treated like a superstar down there.”
Roberto Lopes in Cape Verde training during last year’s Africa Cup of Nations in Ivory Coast (Franck Fife/AFP via Getty Images)
Everyone The Athletic spoke to for this article was contacted using LinkedIn.
If you have never heard of or used LinkedIn before, the best way to describe it would be as an online CV where people build, expand and maintain their professional networks. It’s also a popular recruitment tool.
The site is brimming with self-congratulatory career updates and hot-take blog posts often inspired by a completely unrelated field of work or moment in popular culture. For example, someone who works in marketing might spin the England men’s team being knocked out of a major tournament into a post about defeat being the first real step towards success in the workplace.
Like Lopes, LinkedIn has been pivotal to 24-year-old striker Elliott Dugan’s career, too. In 2019, he was released by Swindon Town’s academy and after a spell with fourth-tier Swedish side Ytterhogdals IK, Dugan was like many players left without a club during the Covid pandemic. He kept himself busy by taking up a temp job with the Royal Mail postal service.
“My mate told me about LinkedIn and said it’s a really good networking app but I hadn’t really touched it,” Dugan — who has worked at a leisure centre in his native city of Bath, as well as in a tapas kitchen — says. “The world was at a standstill (in 2020) and I thought: ‘Why don’t I just start messaging clubs on LinkedIn and see what happens?’.”
Dugan prepared a template message with help from his dad and compiled a highlights reel of him in action to send out to prospective clubs.
In the hours he wasn’t delivering other people’s mail, he was sending virtual letters of his own on LinkedIn. He estimates he has sent over 1,000 messages to various coaches, directors, scouts and agents around the world in the past four years. His hours of endless messaging paid off when offers began to stream in.
He had teams in Australia, the United States and across Europe interested, but he eventually signed for Cypriot side APEA Akrotiri after reaching out to the manager there and receiving the offer of a two-week trial.
Since then, Dugan has played for seven more clubs and moves to Kouris Erimis, another Cypriot team, and Northern Irish side Portadown were both initiated on LinkedIn. He says that every move he has made since 2020 has a LinkedIn footprint, given he first connected with the agents he has been represented by on the social media platform.
Dugan left Welsh Premier Division side Connah’s Quay in December and is back online using LinkedIn to hunt for his next opportunity. He has encouraged other players to use the platform in the same way. Cameron Evans is one of his former team-mates (at non-League side Taunton Town, who play in English football’s seventh tier) who listened. He joined League Two Newport County in July 2024 and told BBC Sport Wales that the move came about after he directly messaged club chairman Huw Jenkins.
Jordan Lussey captained Liverpool’s under-18s and played for England at youth level. After training with Steven Gerrard, Philippe Coutinho and Luis Suarez, Lussey was released by Liverpool in 2015. He went on to sign for Bolton Wanderers and from there, has mostly featured for non-League sides. The midfielder currently plays for eighth-tier side, Bootle.
“Footballers don’t use it enough,” Lussey, who is also a football coach and has the green ‘open to work’ banner attached to his profile picture on the site, argues. “The perception of LinkedIn is it’s for businesspeople as opposed to athletes. I got into using LinkedIn when I was out of contract at a club. I started to showcase my CV, my video highlights, and just tried to network with as many people as I could. You know how much footballers use social media but I think more than anything, the most important one they should be on is LinkedIn — and that is probably the one they are on least.
“A few years ago, I managed to secure a trial with Crawley Town, who were League Two at the time, and that was purely through LinkedIn and networking, being able to get hold of the manager and having an initial conversation with them.”
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There is an ominous side to LinkedIn though. A rise in scam agents and scouts means players have to be on guard when using the site to search for real opportunities.
“I have heard some horror stories where players pay an agent to try and get themselves a club and then the agent goes cold, and the player has lost their money,” Lussey says.
“You need to be clued up and have your wits about you, and just be aware that obviously there are good ways to use LinkedIn and there are genuine people wanting to help you, but there’s also people trying to take advantage of you as well.
“When you are chasing the dream, you are prepared to do whatever it takes but you have to be wary of not believing everything you see.”
Jordan Lussey, right, in FA Youth Cup action for Liverpool in 2013 (Christopher Lee/Getty Images)
John Print has been a licensed FIFA agent since 2009. He says players can be so desperate to live out their dream of being a professional footballer that this can make them an easy target for those posing as agents or scouts. One player he represents, Samuel Ofori, a Ghanaian defender who now plays in Moldova, was left reeling when a trial invitation from a club in Sweden arrived, only for him to find out it was not what it seemed.
“I was a little bit sceptical about it (the offer),” Print says. “He actually went to the embassy and they did some research, and discovered it was a fake letter (that Ofori received after initially being contacted on LinkedIn). I didn’t really see it as being genuine but he was in a desperate situation because he needed to progress his career.”
Print says it is not just players being scammed. Parents of young footballers have fallen victim to con artists, too. Dugan runs an Instagram account called “The LinkedIn Footballer” where he uses his expertise and experiences to advise others on utilising the platform and to avoid being duped.
“There’s obvious warning signs to look out for,“ says Dugan. ”For example, an agent asking you for money to get you a trial is a massive red flag.”
One major positive each person The Athletic spoke to agreed upon when it comes to using the employment-focused network is a lack of online abuse.
Agent Jennifer Mendelewitsch founded the agency Supernova Management. She believes Instagram is the platform of choice for agents and players alike, but sees two major benefits to LinkedIn.
“Scouts or sporting directors are changing a lot,” Mendelewitsch says. “Some of them are changing clubs every year, so sometimes you have to check on LinkedIn to see where they actually are.
“I work also as a pundit for a French radio station called RMC and I receive a lot of negative comments on Twitter (X) because it’s one of the biggest shows in France. But it (receiving abusive messages) never happened to me on LinkedIn. It is more civilised because you can use any name on Twitter, any picture, but LinkedIn is your real identity, so people are behaving more politely.”
While it is an app for seemingly endless self-promotional posts, LinkedIn feels like a social media platform less steeped in negativity and abuse, particularly when compared to X, where over 1.1 million accounts were suspended due to abuse, harassment, and hateful content between January and June 2024, according to Statista.
England and Paris Saint-Germain goalkeeper Mary Earps posts regular updates to the platform, while Manchester United and Portugal defender Diogo Dalot has been showing off a different side to himself on there recently. Dalot lists himself not only as a professional athlete but an investor too.
Jordan Foster is a director at sports marketing agency B-Engaged, which lists Dalot, Kai Havertz, Noni Madueke, Serge Gnabry, William Saliba, among others, as clients.
“I know for a fact that Diogo doesn’t want to talk about football or Man United (on LinkedIn). He would talk about it if the time was right but in terms of training, performances and matches, it’s something that he wants to keep separate.
“This is like the other side to his life but again, it is very much supplementary to being a footballer.”
Former Tottenham Hotspur and Liverpool defender Steven Caulker began posting to LinkedIn a couple of years ago and shares honest thoughts about life (as shown below) as a footballer. He is an advocate for player wellbeing and mental health.
“For me, it is the most productive platform,” Caulker, whose offer to become a player-coach at Spanish side Malaga City last year came through LinkedIn, says.
“I don’t have any other social media mostly because when I’m on Instagram or Twitter, or I’ve had them in the past, a lot of it is angry fans or a lot is negative. Whereas on LinkedIn, you have constructive conversations. I can only think of probably five times in the last two years that I would have had a silly comment, and even then it’s more just a disagreement that hasn’t been worded in the best way, but it’s never abuse as such.”
Like Caulker, Joe Savage is using LinkedIn as a place where he can be completely honest. Savage spent close to four years as the sporting director of Scottish Premiership club Hearts. His lengthy posts about his time in the director’s chair have been well received for their openness, just as Caulker’s candid posts about him being in recovery from gambling and alcohol addictions have.
“I just wanted people to understand what I went through,” Savage says. “We’re not robots and I’m not the greatest sporting director in the world by any stretch, but I just wanted to say: ‘Look, this is how I found the job’.
“LinkedIn has been absolutely brilliant. There was one comment where some guy wrote, ‘You are just talking a load of rubbish’ so I wrote back to say if that is what you feel, then fair enough. He then deleted his comment and that was it.
“It is social media but it is different to Instagram and X, where there are hidden, fake profiles and where people set up profiles just to abuse and insult you just because they can and they want to.”
A year ago, Lussey was playing in a non-League match for Marine and suffered a serious ankle injury.
An MRI scan revealed he had ruptured both the anterior talo-fibular ligament (ATFL) and calcaneofibular ligament (CFL) in his right ankle. With the NHS (National Health Service) wait-time standing at around 12 months, Lussey discovered that his player insurance did not cover a private operation on his ankle ligaments, denying him the chance to begin his rehabilitation sooner.
He set up a GoFundMe page to raise money towards his treatment, rehab and loss of earnings, and he was was eager to alert other semi-professional players to check their levels of cover, too. It was on X where Lussey’s posts met a high level of engagement, particularly among Liverpool fans. He shared similar posts to LinkedIn and despite lower numbers in terms of traffic, he has found it to be a space where more footballers feel comfortable opening up.
“You’re not getting that fan engagement that you get on social media,” he says. “LinkedIn is a diary. On LinkedIn, I feel like you are a bit more protected when being yourself and sharing your opinion or your experiences.”
(Photo: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
