Historian Todd Cleveland Publishes History of Soccer in Portuguese Translation

The cover of “Seguindo a Bola: A Importância dos Futebolistas Africanos no Império Colonial Português.”

Infinito Particular, a press based in Lisbon, Portugal, recently published Seguindo a Bola: A Importância dos Futebolistas Africanos no Império Colonial Português, written by Todd Cleveland, a professor in the Department of History. Seguindo a Bola is a Portuguese translation of the original, English language version of the book, Following the Ball: The Migration of African Soccer Players across the Portuguese Colonial Empire, 1949-1975, published by Ohio University Press in 2017.

The book incorporates social, labor, sport, diasporic, and imperial histories to reconstruct the 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.

The book examines the ways that players, such as the great Eusébio, creatively and strategically 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, the book considers how they often assumed roles as social and cultural intermediaries and counters reductive histories that have depicted footballers as colonial pawns and exploited athletes.

To reconstruct these players’ transnational histories, Cleveland 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, his book unearths structural and experiential consistencies and contrasts, and illuminates the components and processes of empire.

Cleveland is professor of history at the University of Arkansas and has been a member of the faculty since 2015. He is an expert on the history of Sub-Saharan Africa, and has published widely on Lusophone African history. His books include Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917-1975, which also appeared in Portuguese translation, and A History of Tourism in Africa: Exoticization, Exploitation, and Enrichment. His next book, Alluring Opportunities: Tourism, Empire, and African Labor in Colonial Mozambique, will be published by Cornell University Press in 2023.