Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, footballer, 1942-2014

No great footballer grew up further from great football than Eusébio, the Portuguese forward who died of a heart attack on Sunday aged 71. Born in 1942 in the Portuguese colony Mozambique, he spent his youth playing barefoot on dirt fields. His closest contact with the game in the motherland was listening to Benfica’s matches on a crackling radio. Yet he became Portugal’s most famous footballer, used as a national symbol by the country’s fascist government.

Eusébio da Silva Ferreira was one of eight children of a white railway mechanic from Angola and a black mother. Blessed with a boxer’s torso and a sprinter’s legs, he ran 100m in 11 seconds while still a teenager. He played unpaid for the local Sporting club.

A chance conversation in a Lisbon barbershop in 1960 changed his life: a Brazilian coach, whose team had toured Mozambique, rhapsodised about the youngster to Benfica’s coach Bela Guttmann. Guttmann flew to Mozambique and signed Eusébio for a pittance. Eusébio always remembered a newspaper photograph of his widowed mother sitting at a table with her arms around a pile of money.

Benfica flew him to Lisbon. But Sporting Lisbon – for whose Mozambican franchise Eusébio had played – claimed him too. He spent months in the Algarve waiting for the quarrel to subside. In his first big game for Benfica in 1961, a friendly against Pelé’s Santos, he scored three goals as a substitute. “Who’s that guy?” Pelé asked.

Within two weeks of joining Benfica, Eusébio was playing for Portugal. In May 1962, he ended his first professional season by scoring twice as Benfica beat Real Madrid 5-3 in the European Cup final. After the match, Real’s great Alfredo Di Stéfano gave him his shirt – a symbolic handing on of the mantle.

Eusébio lost his other three European finals, but always transfixed fans. A twenty-first century athlete in a much slower era of football, he achieved precision at top speed. He smacked the heavy leather balls of the day so hard that keepers just prayed for survival. In 1965 he was voted European Footballer of the Year.

Little of his career was shown on TV, and the one month when he registered worldwide was his only World Cup, in England in 1966. His nine goals for Portugal made him the tournament’s leading scorer. His four that beat North Korea represented “one of the best individual performances you’ll ever see,” said England’s Bobby Charlton. Portugal’s ensuing semifinal against England was scheduled for Goodison Park in Liverpool, where the Portuguese had played twice and felt at home. However, England’s Football Association belatedly arranged a switch of venue to Wembley in London, a bigger stadium and England’s base. The Portuguese had to take a train down the evening before the game. Why was the match moved? “We were poor and small. England was rich and powerful,” Eusébio told the journalist Gabriele Marcotti. England’s 2-1 victory left him forever feeling cheated, convinced that Portugal would have won in Liverpool. Famously, he cried on the field. “I looked at the sky and said, ‘Lord what have I done to deserve this?’ and that’s when the tears came.”

Yet he could also be magnanimous in defeat. In the 1968 European Cup final against Manchester United, again at Wembley, he blasted a cannonball at United’s keeper Alex Stepney, who somehow caught it. Eusébio repeatedly patted Stepney on the back, tried to shake his hand, and when rebuffed, gave him the thumbs-up.

Several richer foreign clubs tried to sign him from Benfica. However, the Portuguese dictator António Salazar wouldn’t let him leave, and to ensure he stayed, even made him do three years’ military service in the anti-aircraft artillery. For Salazar, Eusébio was the ideal symbol of the Portuguese empire: a determinedly apolitical sportsman, whose magnificent body seemed to incarnate the natural treasures of the colonies. Eusébio later called Salazar a “slave master” of both himself and Portugal, but didn’t speak out during his career. He feared jail, he later explained.

Mozambique’s armed struggle for independence raged during his prime. Eusébio never backed it. Even his nickname, “The Black Panther”, discomfited him with its echo of the radical American Black Panther movement. Eventually he reconciled his two homelands, telling the British sociologist Gary Armstrong: “I represented Africa and Portugal.”

In 1975 he moved to North America. A year later he won a North American title with the Toronto Metros-Croatia while earning about four times more than at Benfica. But after six operations on the same knee, he retired in 1979. He had scored 733 goals in 745 professional matches. In later years he limped, slept into the afternoons, and overdid the whisky. Yet he remained beloved. He hoped his funeral procession would pause by his statue outside Benfica’s Stadium of Light, before entering the stadium. Portugal’s government has declared three national days of mourning.