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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949–1975 by Todd Cleveland Marcos Cardão Cleveland, Todd –Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949–1975. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017. Pp. 280. In the context of the late Portuguese Empire, football articulated and reflected the ideologies, actions, practical and symbolic disputes, and expectations of different individuals and groups. Football, its practitioners, and its agents provide a field for reading social and power relations during Portuguese colonialism. It is precisely what Todd Cleveland does in a pioneering book on the migration of African football players across the Portuguese colonial empire between 1948 and 1975, which analyzes how they adopted a series of social, labour, and sporting strategies to face their new environment. This is a theme not yet examined by the growing body of literature on football in Portugal and former Portuguese colonies. Divided into five chapters, the book starts with an overview of the Portuguese colonial empire and the introduction of football into Portugal's African empire, discussing the role that agents, newspapers, and radio had in the sport's dissemination. It then examines the ways African players began to play the sport and form their own clubs and associations. Chapter 3 addresses the colonial regime's motivations for permitting these players to relocate to Portuguese clubs. Chapter 4 examines the challenges these players faced in Portugal, separated from their families and dealing with the rigours of professional football in Europe. Chapter 5 explores how the players navigated the shifting politically charged environments. Finally, an epilogue considers the lasting impact and legacies of these players in Portugal. The book examines in detail the experiences of African football players who migrated to Portugal and faced a political charged environment, dominated by colonial rule and an authoritarian regime that created a powerful ideology to justify Portuguese colonial empire: Lusotropicalism presented a glorifying view of Portuguese colonialism and emphasized the feats and virtues of the Portuguese, especially their lack of racial prejudice, which was construed as a symbol of their national character. Without ignoring the role of colonial ideology, and the propagandistic value of the presence of African football players in Portugal, Cleveland underlines the importance of the global sporting processes, thus putting the research in an international framework. By looking at football as an international job market, and thus valuing the players' opportunities to play for a top metropolitan club, the author avoids both methodological nationalisms and theories of alienation that often portray football players as either dupes of ideology or passive victims. Instead, Cleveland treats his subjects as engaged in different power relations, which produced and shaped their subjectivity. Even if the author sometimes uses the misleading category of apoliticism, he understands power in a relational way, implying a relationship between individuals and institutions. Following the Ball succeeds in its goals of seeing football as a terrain of struggles and of acknowledging the strategies of football players dealing with political conjuncture. Instead of focusing on political forms of contestation, the book explores the ways football players adopted European styles and conventions, [End Page 189] embraced Portuguese football clubs, and "pragmatically pursued opportunities to improve their lives" (p. 10). This choice acknowledges the complexities of the sociopolitical context and manages to broaden the scope of historical subjects. To highlight the elements of subjectivity that permeate the migratory movements of African players, the author could have considered such concepts as Sandro Mezzadra's "(right to) escape" (Ephemera, vol. 4, no. 3 (2004), pp. 267–275), which opens the category of migration to other political connotations. Studies of migrant labour point to the transnational dimensions of migration in redefining labour and acknowledge transnational migration as a privileged way to produce new subjectivities. Looking at football migrants as subjects challenges a victimization approach, especially in a discriminatory colonial context in which it is hard to imagine the possibility of producing subjectivities. It expands the notion of agency, usually associated with a formal political filiation in the national liberation movements that fought colonialism, where being "political" was synonymous with insurrectional activities. Cleveland problematizes both the narratives of victimization and...