BUALA

Eusébio in Portuguese Racial Discourse: Recent Claims of (Non-)Racism in Football

These practices were serious enough for the newly independent African nation of Ghana to lodge a legal complaint against Portugal before the International Labour Organisation in 1962, helping to expose the fallacy of Portuguese benevolence towards its black population (Wolfson et al., 2009). As such, Eusébio, falsely made into a symbol of a non-racist past, functions to soften colonial realities and to silence the everyday racism experienced by African and Afro-Portuguese figures, who could not speak up at the time, in contrast to the anti-racist activism of Vinícius Jr. today.

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11.03.2026 | by Andrew Nunes