Curaçao's Joshua Brenet Faces Germany: A World Cup Journey
On Sunday night in Germany, a tiny Caribbean island will stare down a football giant. And on Curaçao’s right flank, a familiar face to German coaches will be running straight into his past.
From Kingdom’s margins to world stage
Curaçao remains a small dot on the map, but it is still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and its football story has been written largely in Dutch stadiums. For decades, Curaçaoans moved to the Netherlands in their thousands. Their children and grandchildren now form the spine of a national team that only gained FIFA recognition in 2010 but has already muscled its way into a World Cup.
The current 26-man squad tells the tale. Twenty-five were born in the Netherlands. Just one first saw daylight on the island itself: Tahith Chong, once Manchester United’s bright-winged prospect, now at Sheffield United and the most recognisable Curaçaoan export in the squad.
Germany, though, will see more than one familiar name.
Six members of this Curaçao side have history in German football. Chong had a brief, bruising six-month loan at Werder Bremen in 2021. Gervane Kastaneer spent time at 1. FC Kaiserslautern. Riechedly Bazoer tried to relaunch at VfL Wolfsburg. Roshon van Eijma played for Preußen Münster. Jürgen Locadia and Joshua Brenet both passed through TSG Hoffenheim.
It is Brenet, though, who brings the sharpest edge to this reunion.
Nagelsmann’s gamble that backfired
In 2018, Hoffenheim paid €3.5 million to prise Joshua Brenet from PSV Eindhoven. The move came with a clear stamp of approval from Julian Nagelsmann, then the rising coaching star of German football and now the man in charge of the national team.
Brenet arrived with pedigree. Three Eredivisie titles with PSV. Two senior caps for the Netherlands. A modern full-back with energy, pace, and ambition.
It never clicked.
He began his Bundesliga life on the bench, watching those first league games drift by. When Hoffenheim prepared for their historic first Champions League match, away to Shakhtar Donetsk, the right-back made a fatal error. He skipped a video session. Nagelsmann’s response was ruthless: Brenet was dropped from the squad for the club’s biggest night.
The door opened again later that season, but only a crack. Brenet’s appearances were scattered, his influence minimal. When Nagelsmann left, the situation worsened. Alfred Schreuder, now his assistant with Germany, barely looked his way. Sebastian Hoeneß eventually pushed him down to the reserves in the fourth-tier Regionalliga Südwest.
On the pitch, he was drifting. Off it, his reputation was sinking faster.
Discipline, downfall, and a hard verdict
At Hoffenheim, Brenet’s name became attached to the wrong sort of details. Repeated disciplinary issues. Chronic lateness. A player once seen as a smart investment turned into an expensive headache. Hoffenheim struggled to find a buyer and ultimately let him go for nothing, his contract running out before he joined Twente Enschede on a free in 2022.
Back in the Netherlands, his football picked up. Performances at Twente reminded people why he had been so highly rated. He looked like a player rebuilding a career.
Then he tore it down again.
In January 2023, Brenet was caught driving without a licence twice in just two weeks. He had already lost that licence in 2020 for drink-driving. This time, the consequences bit harder. A judge, unimpressed by the pattern, delivered a scathing assessment.
“He clearly has no regard for authority. It seems to me as though he is continuing to play football after receiving a red card,” the presiding judge said, handing down a one-month prison sentence in 2024.
It was not his first brush with the courts. In 2021, he had received a suspended sentence, a fine, and community service for domestic violence. The prison term for driving without a licence was later converted to community service on appeal, but Twente’s patience had already snapped. The club terminated his contract.
From there, the career that once ran through Eindhoven and Hoffenheim took a jagged route across continents.
A wandering right-back, a new flag
Brenet resurfaced at Al-Rayyan in Qatar, but his stay was almost a footnote: six appearances in the 2024/25 season and little sign of a settled role. Last autumn, he landed in Scotland with Livingston FC. By the second half of the campaign, he had moved again, this time to Kayserispor in Turkey.
Yet while his club life lurched from stop to stop, his international story was being rewritten.
Despite playing regularly for Dutch youth teams and even making a senior debut for Oranje in the 2016 World Cup qualifiers, Brenet received FIFA’s green light to switch allegiance to Curaçao, his parents’ homeland. The move gave him a new identity on the pitch and Curaçao a seasoned defender with a point to prove.
He made his debut for the island in 2024. The impact was immediate. Six goals in 17 appearances from right-back underline both his attacking instincts and his importance to a side punching above its weight.
In Curaçao’s final warm-up match against Aruba, he started on the right of defence and scored again. A reminder, just before the world turned its eyes to Germany, that this is no bit-part player. He is central to what Curaçao want to be.
Facing the past in Germany’s glare
On Sunday at 7 pm, Curaçao will walk into a World Cup opener against Germany, a nation that still sees itself as a tournament machine even after recent stumbles. For Brenet, it is something else entirely.
He will stand opposite the dugout that holds Nagelsmann and Schreuder, the two coaches who once barely trusted him at club level, and who now lead one of the favourites on home soil. The same men who watched him fail to establish himself at Hoffenheim will now see him as one of the main threats from a supposedly modest opponent.
Curaçao’s squad is built on Dutch streets and European academies, but its heartbeat comes from an island that has long lived in the shadow of others. On Sunday night, that shadow stretches all the way to Germany.
For Joshua Brenet, this is not just a World Cup opener. It is a collision with his own history.
