Eusébio

Early career

Eusébio first started to play for a local amateur team that he and his friends formed called Os Brasileiros (The Brazilians), in honour of the great Brazil national team of the 1950s. They would play under the names of some of those superstars. The balls they used were made of socks stuffed with newspapers rolled into spheres.

Sporting Lourenço Marques

With some friends, Eusébio tried to join Desportivo de Lourenço de Marques, his favourite team and a Benfica feeder team (also the team where Mário Coluna had played before his move to Benfica) but was rejected, without even being given a chance to prove his worth. He was also rejected by Ferroviário de Lourenço Marques. At 12, he then tried his luck with Sporting Clube de Lourenço Marques (branch number 6 of Sporting Lisbon), which accepted him as well as a group of his friends who lived in Eusébio's neighbourhood. There he had his first training sessions supervised by a coaching staff, received his first ever football equipment and played competitive football in an organized way at both youth level and the main senior team. At 15, according to him, he was spotted by a former Juventus goalkeeper turned scout: "When I was 15, Juventus of Italy, wanted to hire me, because one of their scouts, who had been a famous Italian goalkeeper for them, saw me and told them that there was a boy with a potential, that it would be good to take advantage while I was still unknown. Juventus proposed but my mum…

Eusébio was the leading scorer for his country, with 41 goals in 64 matches, until Pauleta equalled and surpassed his record against Latvia on 12 October 2005. Eusébio was also the most capped Portuguese player from 1972, until Nené made his 64th cap against Yugoslavia on 2 June 1984 in a friendly match, breaking Eusébio's record during the UEFA Euro 1984 on 20 June against Romania. He made his debut for the Portugal national team against Luxembourg on 8 October 1961, a match his country lost 4–2, with the player scoring Portugal's first goal in the match.

1966 World Cup

After Portugal qualified for the 1966 World Cup, they were drawn in Group 3, alongside Bulgaria, Hungary and the reigning champions Brazil. After a modest performance against Hungary in the first game, Eusébio scored a goal against Bulgaria. Topping the group with two wins, the team would play against the Brazilians for the final group match. With an injured Pelé, Portugal had no trouble in defeating them with two goals from Eusébio, including a famous volley from a tight angle after a corner kick. The result meant Brazil's early elimination. In the quarter-final, Portugal played North Korea, who had defeated and eliminated Italy in the group stage. After trailing 0–3 in the 25th minute, Eusébio proceeded to score four consecutive goals, two before half time and two in the first fifteen minutes of the second half. His fourth goal in that match came from a penalty when two North Korean players…

Eusébio was born in the Mafalala neighbourhood of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Portuguese Mozambique on 25 January 1942. His parents were Laurindo António da Silva Ferreira, a white railroad worker from Malanje, Portuguese Angola, and his wife Elisa Anissabeni, a black Mozambican woman. He was the fourth child of his parents out of five children (Jaime, Alberto, Adelino, Eusébio and Lucília). Elisa Anissabeni later had another three children from a second marriage (Gilberto, Inocência and Fernando). Growing up in an extremely poor neighbourhood, he used to skip school classes to play barefoot football with his friends (one of them was as José Manuel Alves Holbeche Bastos, whose father José Rodrigues Holbeche Bastos played professional football for Sporting Clube de Lourenço Marques) on improvised pitches and using stuffed socks as footballs. His father also played football in his youth and supported Lisbon's SL Benfica and its affiliate team in Portuguese Mozambique, Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques. He died from tetanus when Eusébio was eight years old in 1950, so the widowed Elisa almost exclusively raised young Eusébio alone. Absorbed by football from an early age, Eusébio studied until the 4th grade (concluded through a final exam when he was already in mainland Portugal), the only among his brothers and sisters without post-primary education. Three of his siblings became engineers.

Eusébio was a devout Roman Catholic and married Flora Claudina Bruheim on 8 October 1965. They had two daughters together, Carla Elisa Bruheim da Silva Ferreira (born 1968) and Sandra Judite Bruheim da Silva Ferreira (born 1969). Eusébio said he went to the Portuguese Parliament eight times to talk to António de Oliveira Salazar who ruled the country from 1932 to 1968 as the virtual dictator of the Estado Novo regime. Eusébio had invitations from big clubs in Europe, and was interested in signing for them, but could not because the "godfather", as he recalled Salazar, would not let him go. After the Carnation Revolution of 1974 in Lisbon and the subsequent independence of Portugal's overseas territory of Mozambique as the People's Republic of Mozambique in 1975, Eusébio lost all of his property and investments in the African country. In a 2011 interview, Eusébio said that he did not like Sporting Lourenço Marques (Sporting CP's affiliate club in Mozambique) because in his neighbourhood it was deemed a club of the elites and the police, which did not like people of color. Eusébio described the club as "racist". Moreover, he also said he did not like Sporting CP while mentioning the kidnapping story "they made up" regarding his transfer to Benfica: "What I do not like is Sporting [CP]" [...] "I do not even like Sporting from there [Mozambique], let alone the one from here [Portugal]". Eusébio liked Desportivo Lourenço Marques, Benfica's feeder team in Mozambique that shared…