Following the Ball. Todd Cleveland
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, religion, and so on could apply for this designation, which, in turn, afforded them a special, intermediate legal status. Assimilados typically benefited from otherwise-rare educational opportunities and were often the offspring of Portuguese fathers and African mothers, known as mestiços (mulattoes). In 1950, although less than 1 percent of the colonial subjects in Portugal’s empire were officially “assimilated,” almost 90 percent of mestiços were.5 It’s not a coincidence that many of the African footballers who relocated to Portugal derived from the mixed-race population; for these players, the process of cultural integration had begun even earlier and was inherently deeper.
Immigrant athletes also actively facilitated their success in the metropole by pursuing a variety of occupational strategies. If African players largely adapted—or integrated—culturally and socially with few difficulties, a series of creative, short- and long-term labor strategies that they had either previously employed in the colonies or simply observed and internalized helped them capitalize to the fullest extent possible on their new opportunities. In some ways, the superstar status that many players enjoyed helps to obscure both their fundamental existence as wage laborers and their reliance on strategies that were derivative, or even imitative, of those that African workers in Portugal’s colonies had been employing for decades, if not longer. For example, prior to leaving Africa, many soccer prospects sought advice from players who had already migrated to Portugal, typically inquiring about which clubs offered the best working and living conditions. Armed with this knowledge, many followed in the footsteps of the athletes who had preceded them, roughly analogous to one of the countless