Background and career
Eusébio da Silva Ferreira (European Portuguese: [ewˈzɛβju ðɐ ˈsilvɐ fɨˈʁɐjɾɐ]; 25 January 1942 – 5 January 2014), nicknamed the "Black Panther", the "Black Pearl" or "o Rei" ("the king"), was a Portuguese footballer who played as a striker. He is considered one of the greatest players of all time as well as Benfica's best player ever. He was known for his speed, technique, athleticism and right-footed shot, making him a prolific goalscorer, accumulating 733 goals in 745 matches. Eusébio was the first ever player to win European Golden Boot, World Cup Golden Boot and UCL Golden Boot. In the UEFA Champions League, he ranks second for the all-time Portuguese top goalscorers, scoring 47 goals.
Eusébio helped Portugal reach third place at the 1966 FIFA World Cup, being the top goalscorer of the tournament with nine goals. He won the Ballon d'Or in 1965 and was runner-up in 1962 and 1966. He is Benfica's all-time top scorer with 473 goals in 440 competitive matches. There, his honours include eleven Primeira Liga titles and a European Cup, also being integral in reaching additional European Cup finals in 1963, 1965 and 1968. He is the second-highest goalscorer, behind Alfredo Di Stéfano, in the pre-Champions League era of the European Cup with 47 goals. He was the European Cup top scorer in 1964–65, 1965–66 and 1967–68. He also won the Bola de Prata for the Primeira Liga top scorer a record seven times. He was the first ever player to win the European Golden Boot, in 1968, a feat he replicated in 1973.
From his retirement until his death, Eusébio was an ambassador of football and was one of the most recognizable faces of his generation. His name often appears in best player of all time lists and polls by football critics and fans. He was elected the ninth-best footballer of the 20th century in a poll by the IFFHS and the tenth-best footballer of the 20th century in a poll by the World Soccer magazine. Pelé named Eusébio as one of the 125 best living footballers in his 2004 FIFA 100 list. He was seventh in the online poll for UEFA Golden Jubilee Poll. In November 2003, to celebrate UEFA's Jubilee, he was selected as the Golden Player of Portugal by the Portuguese Football Federation as their most outstanding player of the past 50 years. Shortly after Eusébio's death, Di Stéfano stated: "For me Eusébio will always be the best player of all time".
Eusébio was born in the Mafalala neighbourhood of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Portuguese Mozambique on 25 January 1942. His parents were Laurindo António da Silva Ferreira, a white railroad worker from Malanje, Portuguese Angola, and his wife Elisa Anissabeni, a black Mozambican woman. He was the fourth child of his parents out of five children (Jaime, Alberto, Adelino, Eusébio and Lucília). Elisa Anissabeni later had another three children from a second marriage (Gilberto, Inocência and Fernando). Growing up in an extremely poor neighbourhood, he used to skip school classes to play barefoot football with his friends (one of them was as José Manuel Alves Holbeche Bastos, whose father José Rodrigues Holbeche Bastos played professional football for Sporting Clube de Lourenço Marques) on improvised pitches and using stuffed socks as footballs. His father also played football in his youth and supported Lisbon's SL Benfica and its affiliate team in Portuguese Mozambique, Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques. He died from tetanus when Eusébio was eight years old in 1950, so the widowed Elisa almost exclusively raised young Eusébio alone. Absorbed by football from an early age, Eusébio studied until the 4th grade (concluded through a final exam when he was already in mainland Portugal), the only among his brothers and sisters without post-primary education. Three of his siblings became engineers.
Eusébio first started to play for a local amateur team that he and his friends formed called Os Brasileiros (The Brazilians), in honour of the great Brazil national team of the 1950s. They would play under the names of some of those superstars. The balls they used were made of socks stuffed with newspapers rolled into spheres.
