Alberto Mota Gomes, the first coach to lead Cape Verde's national football team, has died at the age of 91, Clube Desportivo Travadores announced on Monday. The club said he died following a prolonged illness.
Travadores, the club where Mota Gomes played much of his career, said in a Facebook post that he stood out as one of the best footballers of his generation. The club recalled that he also represented clubs in Coimbra, Portugal, while studying at university there.
The club described him as an "unmissable figure" in its history, pointing to the dedication he showed to the institution throughout his life.
Football career with Travadores and Cape Verde
On the pitch, Mota Gomes led Travadores to the Santiago championship and the Cape Verde national championship in the 1972/73 season without losing a single match.
He went on to become president of the Regional Football Association of Santiago Sul and was later named Cape Verde's first national team coach, taking charge of the side at the Amílcar Cabral Cup in 1978, a regional tournament named after Amílcar Cabral, the independence leader of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Before that appointment, he had already led a Cape Verdean national team on a trip to Guinea-Bissau.
Pioneer of hydrogeology in Cape Verde
Away from football, Mota Gomes was one of Cape Verde's first geologists and spent much of his career studying groundwater and water resources across the archipelago nation.
He held a doctorate in Geosciences-Hydrogeology from the University of Aveiro, in Portugal, and was a full professor at the University of Cape Verde, where he carried out research on the country's water resources.
Government honour in 2020
In 2020, Cape Verde's government awarded him the first degree of the Medal of Professional Merit, recognising what it called his valuable personal and professional contribution to the country's water resources.
At the time, then Prime Minister Ulisses Correia e Silva described Mota Gomes as a pioneer of water resource management in Cape Verde and a reference public servant, highlighting his career as a technician, leader, academic and researcher.
