Portugal is in mourning. This post is 24 hours too late. It took us 24 hours to gather words of friends and family to include in this tribute.
Eusebio was consensually taken as a very good person. We think he really was a very good person.
He was not simply a genius, he was a simple genius.
People pilgrimaged to see him play. All genders. Families. His passion for the game transpired outside all stadiums and national borders. It was about people in general and families. He did cross those
borders for everyone to see him as a man first and a sportsman second. He
brought football to people who never watch it or has the slightest
interest in it. If anyone would tempt anyone to watch football, Eusebio would.
He was driven to the point of sainthood by the regime before 1974. He was one of the 3 “Fs” of the official propaganda: Family, Fatima and Football.
The Football was Eusebio.
Never involved in any sort of scandal. Never a star. Never his name linked to a headline that wasn’t about his greatness, as a man, as sportsman, as a citizen.
The biggest star in a team in which he never stopped calling his captain by “Mr Coluna” and in which he asked permission to take penalty kicks.
His sportsmanship was truly an example. A genuinely humble true sportsman. He couldn’t stand losing but was always, but always, a kind winner. There isn’t one adversary who ever felt anything but honour to be defeated by him.
But it is not only his sportsmanship we would like to highlight.
Eusebio was a Mandela. He lived in two wall less prisons. One, his race, the other the regime who made him an idol.
He was a black man in a white man’s world. In a white man’s time. A time when a black man was only considered human if a sportsman or a singer and even then always manacled to the colour of skin seen like a circus act. Eusebio was never such. Eusebio was a man. Truly loved and respected as such.
The regime made him a symbol. As we said, almost to the point of sainthood. So much so that Salazar clearly and openly determined that he could not be bought by any club in the world, including Real Madrid, a club Eusebio loved.
But Eusebio didn’t become the symbol of Portugal because of the regime. He became by his own right. He was Eusebio. He was Portugal. One couldn’t speak of one without mentioning the other, one couldn’t think of one without thinking of the other.
When the regime crumbled, Eusebio's greatness remained immaculate. The regime used him but he was always superior to the regime.
He was a truly global phenomenon before globalisation. The biggest star in the first televised, thus global, sport phenomenon: 1966 World Cup in Britain.
He never left Portugal and yet he was known all over the world. The world only realised where Portugal was because of Eusebio.
Eusebio was a Mandela because like Mandela he was a uniter. Way, way beyond football.
Portugal loved him and loved to be represented by him.
Today we all love football. We all love Eusebio.
But more than loved, which he will always will be, he will be remembered and respected.
