from all backgrounds, their experiences as social intermediaries evince a pattern of multidirectional strategic engagement. Ultimately, by highlighting these athletic intermediaries’ recurring expressions of cooperation and conciliation, this study further problematizes the “interpretive dichotomy of resistance and collaboration” that reductively construes Africans’ actions as either assistive of or obstructive to the colonial process.25
IV. Through an examination of the ways these African migrants drew upon occupational skills in the metropole that had been learned in their homelands, this book also engages with the extensive literature that traces the application of indigenous knowledge and techniques in the diaspora. Studies by Carney and Knight, for example, demonstrate how Africans in the Americas employed assorted techniques and skills to enhance their lives or simply to mitigate the hardships that many of these marginalized, or even enslaved, individuals faced.26 This study extends the area of investigation to include not only particular proficiencies, but also a series of operative labor tactics to which emigrant athletes had been exposed or had practiced themselves while still in Africa, typically during nonsoccer employment arranged for them by their colonial football clubs. Following their arrival in Europe, players applied these tactics in creative ways or drew upon them to inspire new occupational strategies.
African footballers also displayed a type of professionalism in the metropole that they had cultivated and internalized while playing in the colonies and, thus, even before they became remunerated practitioners. This approach included adherence to strict practice schedules and cooperation with coaches, teammates, and club officials. Yet this ethic also extended to life away from the pitch, including players’ commitment to lifestyles that wouldn’t undermine or compromise their athletic abilities or capabilities.27 In most cases, the Portuguese coaches active in the colonies were responsible for instilling this approach to the game among aspiring talents. As former players in Portugal, these overseers introduced the tactics, strategies, and, perhaps most importantly, training regimens that African players would need to adopt if they were to succeed in the elite echelons of the Portuguese, European, and, eventually, global soccer firmaments.
If indigenous practitioners had infused the game with theater and artifice—supposed constituents of the “flair” that the African-appropriated game came to feature—aspiring players had to temper these tendencies and demonstrate the type of athletic discipline and tactical approach demanded at the highest levels of the sport. In these contentions, my analysis diverges from conclusions drawn by, for example, Lanfranchi and Taylor, who have argued that “the particular skills required have allowed African [footballers] with relatively low levels of ‘Westernization’ to become successful on both continents. . . . Like music, football has created popular figures . . . who have progressed without . . . requiring training to adapt to Western standards.”28 In the Lusophone context, players’ occupational “Westernization” was absolutely vital to their success in Portugal. Former player Hilário, who hailed from Mozambique and starred on Portugal’s 1966 World Cup squad, confirmed this assertion in testimony he offered during our interview: “On almost all of the teams in Mozambique, the coaches were Portuguese. . . . When I left Mozambique at the age of nineteen, I was already able to play for Sporting [Lisbon] and the [Portuguese] national team. . . . In the colonial time, the soccer formation was better, the Portuguese coaches maximized our skills. When we got to Portugal, we could play for [the best teams], and now if the best player from Mozambique comes here [Portugal], he would have to play in the second or third division.”29
V. Finally, a substantive examination of these Lusophone players also helps to shift scholarly focus away from “exploitative colonial and neo-imperial states” and “predatory clubs”—recurrent themes in African football scholarship—to the athletes themselves.30 By listening to these migrant footballers’ motivations and objectives, by considering their social origins, and by examining their strategic actions, it’s clear that their experiences not only reflected but also actively shaped colonial and metropolitan interactions and policies. Furthermore, the salaries they earned from their clubs were commensurate with their experience; meritocratic (Eusébio, appropriately, eventually became the highest-earning footballer in the country); and largely consistent with Portuguese players’ wages, while many African-born footballers also captained their squads and even the national team. Similarly, their relationship with the Portuguese regime was functional for both entities, rather than purely exploitative for either, and even its political dimensions remained largely undeveloped.31 Throughout their careers, these athletes exhibited both highly pragmatic and calculated behavior, belying a passivity and victimization that “predatory” relationships inherently feature.
In this contention, my study echoes the work of scholars who have dismissed reductive characterizations of African migrant footballers in Europe as “merely tools of European club owners,” thereby dispelling notions of these athletes as casualties of alleged exploitation.32 Instead, I analyze them as emigrant workers—professionals—who, with an eye to their postathletic lives, strategically offered their labor to those employers in both the colonies and the metropole that provided the most appealing working conditions. As Eusébio’s mother candidly proclaimed after being asked why her son chose Benfica, a celebrated Lisbon-based outfit, over other metropolitan clubs who were also aggressively courting him: “Benfica gave ‘big money.’” Studies that sound the alarm regarding the historical (and contemporary) exodus of African footballers thereby risk ignoring these migrants’ aspirations to improve their lives, and those of family members, just as millions of Africans did throughout the colonial era and continue to do today.
Methodology and Sources
This book draws upon archival materials, popular media sources, and interviews with former players and coaches in order to reconstruct the experiences of these African athletes and the multitude of settings in which they operated. Portugal’s Ministry of Education houses the most useful and insightful archival sources, namely, the colonial-era records associated with player transfers from Africa. This trail of documentation is particularly illuminative of the period covering the buildup in the 1940s to the initial relocation of African footballers to Portugal, as it features debates between metropolitan and colonial officials and representatives from the most powerful Portuguese clubs, including Benfica, Sporting, Porto, and Belenenses, which coveted the star prospects. Sensing that the Estado Novo government might be amenable to these athletic imports, during the 1940s metropolitan clubs began submitting formal appeals to the administration to permit their relocation. Although each of the eventual player transfers to the metropole prompted a clutch of accompanying paperwork, these sources are most revealing when problems arose during the transferal processes. Recurrent issues included disputes over fees, competition among clubs for a particular player, and the accommodation of players’ requests to relocate to a specific location, often to live with relatives or to continue their studies. In these situations, the paper trail features a range of contributing entities and offers considerable detail, which proved extremely useful to reconstructions of the players’ lives.
Popular media similarly constituted extremely illuminative source material. Portuguese newspapers from the period provide not only social and sports commentary, but also interviews with the footballers, even if these players’ statements primarily relate to on-the-pitch events. Much more insightful was the extended run of Ídolos (Idols) pamphlets, published as a series in Portugal during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, each issue of which featured a particular athlete from one of an array of sports, including soccer. These booklets include biographical information, personal histories, interviews, and photos. And although many of these “idols” were white Portuguese athletes, a number of African-born players were included in the collection as well. Although the tenor of Ídolos is light and naturally celebratory, the African footballers offered candid answers to questions that probed their “likes” and “dislikes” about life in Portugal and how they spent time away from the pitch in their daily lives—the fodder of social history.
For all the insights these sources provide, however, they remain limited in several important ways. First, although
