Following the Ball : The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949–1975

Authors

Todd Cleveland

Files

Series

Research in International Studies, Global and Comparative Studies

Description

With Following the Ball, Todd Cleveland incorporates labor, sport, diasporic, and imperial history to examine the extraordinary experiences of African football players from Portugal’s African colonies as they relocated to the metropole from 1949 until the conclusion of the colonial era in 1975. The backdrop was Portugal’s increasingly embattled Estado Novo regime, and its attendant use of the players as propaganda to communicate the supposed unity of the metropole and the colonies.

Cleveland zeroes in on the ways that players, such as the great Eusébio, creatively exploited opportunities generated by shifts in the political and occupational landscapes in the waning decades of Portugal’s empire. Drawing on interviews with the players themselves, he shows how they often assumed roles as social and cultural intermediaries and counters reductive histories that have depicted footballers as mere colonial pawns.

To reconstruct these players’ transnational histories, the narrative traces their lives from the 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 multi-continental space in a single analytical field, the book unearths structural and experiential consistencies and contrasts, and illuminates the components and processes of empire.

Copyright Statement

Following the Ball © 2017 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780896804999

Publication Date

10-16-2017

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

Following the Ball, Todd Cleveland, African footballers, Portuguese empire, colonialism, diaspora, sports history, labor history, imperial history, Eusébio, Estado Novo, propaganda, transnational history, colonial Africa, migration, metropole-colony relations, cultural exchange, identity, decolonization, soccer, Africa-Europe relations, postcolonial studies

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Global Studies | Labor History | Sports Studies

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Cleveland, Todd, "Following the Ball : The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949–1975" (2017). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 95.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/95