It was supposed to be a pure moment when Stephen Eustáquio scored that low volley against South Africa on June 28. It sent Canada to the Round of 16 of the World Cup for the first time in the country’s history. And it was for a short time. Then there was the talk.
A reporter asked a question that was so badly worded that people all over North America thought Eustáquio had really lost his young daughter. They were probably trying to show that the goal was heavy with personal tragedy. He didn’t. The girl he had in April 2024 is still alive. Her name is Benedita. She was at the baseball game. Live viewers saw Eustáquio carrying her close to the stands. But the damage from that badly worded question spread quickly. Within hours, there were a lot of searches on the internet for “Stephen Eustáquio daughter died.”
We want to be clear: the rumor is not true. The girl who was Eustáquio’s daughter has not died.
What is true, and what the reporter may have been trying to say, is that Eustáquio has really been sad for the past two years. Esmeralda, his mother, died in April 2023 from brain cancer. It was May 2024 when his father, Armando, died of a heart attack. There were two parents who died thirteen months apart. He was 26 years old when his mother died. He hadn’t even had time to think about that before his dad left too.
He had tears in his eyes after the game was over for a reason. “Everything I do is for my family, for my parents, for my girlfriend, for my daughter,” he said with a cracked voice. That wasn’t a prepared speech. There was someone who felt the full weight of a moment his parents never saw. After the game, Canada’s head coach Jesse Marsch said that Eustáquio’s parents were making fun of him. It was the kind of thing coaches say, but this time it didn’t work out. It felt like it was deserved.
People online were very angry about the reporter’s question. Reddit threads got full very quickly. People said they were cringing and yelling at screens in their living rooms. A lot of people said the question wasn’t only wrong, but it was also misleading to ask someone to publicly process the deaths of both parents right after the biggest moment of their career. There is a chance that the reporter meant well. That is a kind read. But intent and effect are two different things. The effect was that that interview made millions of people not sure if a toddler had died.
Eustáquio was born in Leamington, Ontario, in December 1996. His parents were from Portugal, but they eventually moved the family back to Portugal. Before joining the Canadian national team in 2019, he played for Portugal as a youth player on his way to becoming one of Canada’s best midfielders and now playing for Porto. His older brother Mauro, who is also a former worker, has been there the whole time.
In May 2025, his fiancée, the Portuguese fashion designer Constança Damião, asked him to marry her. Benedita, their daughter, is a little over a year old. It looks like Eustáquio is building the kind of family life that his parents worked hard to make possible for him. That is the real story.
How quickly false information spreads is shown by the story about his daughter that went viral. This is especially true when an awkward interview question leaves a space for rumor to fill. Too much has been lost for Stephen Eustáquio. The loss of his daughter is not one of those.
