motivated, aimed to appease external critics of Lisbon rather than to genuinely loosen social restrictions and liberalize colonial society. The inclusion of African players, such as Eusébio, on Portugal’s club and national soccer teams and their sustained continental and international success constituted valuable propaganda for the increasingly embattled Estado Novo regime, which was utilized to highlight the supposed unity of the metropole and the colonies, as well as the opportunities for social mobility that its African subjects allegedly enjoyed.
This book examines the experiences of these African athletes as they relocated to Portugal from 1949 until the conclusion of the colonial era in 1975, negotiated this politically charged environment, and consolidated their postsoccer futures.2 Although always minorities on their Portuguese clubs, these players’ sporting, social, and political impacts in the colonies, metropole, and, ultimately, globally, far outweigh their numerical modesty. Beyond their outsized sporting influence, they also instilled both racial and national pride among their African compatriots and concurrently generated esteem for an increasingly beleaguered Portugal. In reconstructing the players’ transnational histories, the narrative traces their lives from the humble, informal soccer spaces in colonial Africa to the manicured pitches of Europe, while simultaneously focusing on their off-the-field challenges and successes. By examining this multicontinental space in a single analytical field, Following the Ball illuminates the structural and experiential consistencies and discrepancies across the constituent settings, and also considers the components and processes of empire. These athletes’ experiences also serve to blur the lines between colonial and metropolitan milieus, as players, clubs, and sporting news and tactics increasingly circulated between these various nodes, reinvigorating their historical links and drawing them into closer dialogue, even as African liberation movements fought to sever these imperial connections. This book also engages with global processes by exploring not only how external political and sporting developments shaped these Lusophone histories, but also how players and clubs across the Portuguese empire articulated them locally.
Although this study features football and its practitioners as its central topics, it also provides a window into social relations in colonial and metropolitan societies, embedding sport in these shifting historical contexts and elucidating the ways that African players forged cooperative, symbiotic relationships across seemingly unbridgeable divides. Institutionalized racism profoundly shaped social interactions in Portugal’s colonies, yet the meaningful and durable bonds these players cultivated with teammates, fans, and club officials suggest a complexity in race relations in both the colonies and the metropole that belies reductive renderings. Within this relational spectrum, the players often assumed roles as social and cultural intermediaries, operating between an assortment of societal segments and strata in Africa and Europe. Ultimately, by exploring the ways these players creatively exploited opportunities generated by shifts in the political and occupational landscapes in the waning decades of Portugal’s empire, the book aims to prompt reconsiderations of social relations and processes in late colonial Lusophone Africa, as well as in the metropolitan core, while also opening up new ways of thinking about sport, society, and power in this pivotal period in global history.
From Africa to Europe: Navigating the Metropole
Although the Portuguese regime sanctioned the relocation of African players due to their athletic skills, it also deemed them valuable resources in an increasingly fraught global-political scenario. As such, even as the regime progressively emphasized football’s role as one of the three pillars of the nation, alongside fado music and Fátima (famed location of a shrine to Christianity)3—the so-called “three f’s”—the state secret police closely monitored players’ actions. Even the labor reforms that facilitated the players’ migration to Portugal were, ultimately, similarly restrictive. For example, despite steady interest from clubs across Europe to secure the signatures of these African footballers, the regime refused to permit them to transfer abroad, even going so far as to classify Eusébio as a “national asset” to preclude his exit. This unwillingness to allow athletes to practice their trade elsewhere contradicted the Estado Novo’s self-congratulatory propaganda regarding the expansion of freedoms within the empire that these soccer migrants supposedly epitomized.
In addition to geographical constraints, African players faced an array of challenges associated with their long-distance migration. Having endured protracted journeys to Portugal, newly removed from friends and family members, and thrust into a climate that most of the athletes found disagreeable, many initially longed for their homelands. For example, as José Maria, who hailed from Angola and first traveled to Portugal in December 1962 to play for Vitória de Setúbal, explained, “I knew it was going to be colder . . . but I never imagined it would be that much colder. . . . That negatively affected my career when I first arrived. I wanted to run the field but I couldn’t because I could feel the cold wind touching my skin like razor blades. . . . I thought I was going to die.”4 Notwithstanding the formidable climatic acclimation obstacles that migrant athletes faced, the vast majority eventually settled in well, adjusting to their new environs, succeeding both on and off the pitch, and often remaining in Portugal after their playing days concluded.
This transitional success was, however, predicated on more than just the players’ sheer athleticism. Their typically steady integration into metropolitan society, their decisions to parlay their ability to migrate into a host of educational and remunerative opportunities—the benefits of which endured long after their athletic abilities faded—and their generation and sustenance of genuine adulation among a fan base that stretched from the metropole to the colonies (and beyond) required much more than simply excellent soccer skills. I argue that these players so adroitly navigated their new milieu owing to a series of strategies that they adopted, including: cooperation across a range of social and racial divides; the internalization of Portuguese customs prior to their arrival; employment of labor tactics learned or observed in the colonies; and an unflinching apoliticism, even as the wars for independence were raging in Portugal’s African colonies—their homelands.
Most of the strategic behavior that underpinned players’ social and athletic success in the metropole was formatively developed in the colonies, well before the migrants ever set foot in Portugal. As members of neighborhood (bairro) teams and underfunded clubs across an assortment of African municipalities, players began to forge the personal relationships that would assist them as they steadily ascended the successive layers of colonial and metropolitan soccerdom. Although social relations were initially cultivated among neighborhood friends, as the players moved up the levels, their clubs’ rosters increasingly featured racial, religious, and geographical diversity.
These new teammates provided indispensable support as players transitioned from casual practitioners to professional athletes, committing increasing amounts of time to improving their soccer skills. Although football in Portugal’s colonies had initially developed strictly along racial lines, and thus in parallel, after World War II the sport newly began to constitute a more diverse, inclusive space. Experiences on integrated squads in the colonies would serve African players well following their relocation to metropolitan outfits, as, despite their growing ranks, they never outnumbered their white teammates on any of the Portuguese clubs.
If participation on squads in Africa that featured demographical diversity helped these footballers integrate socially upon reaching the metropole, meaningful exposure to Portuguese culture in the colonies was similarly vital. Indeed, virtually all the African clubs with which these players were affiliated before being “discovered” featured Portuguese coaches and were invariably located in urban centers, the loci of European colonization. Consequently, every one of these future migrants spent time in intensely colonized spaces and was, therefore, exposed to Portuguese customs and values prior to leaving the continent.
Additionally, many of the players were members of an extremely small, semiprivileged minority in Portugal’s colonies, known as assimilados, or “assimilateds.” Until 1961, when the Estado Novo regime abandoned this classification, Africans whom the state deemed sufficiently Portuguese in regard to language, culture,
