Eusébio

Portugal were 0–3 down inside twenty-five minutes of a World Cup quarter-final. He scored four — the 27th, the 43rd, the 56th and the 59th — and Portugal won 5–3. Four of the five were his.

He scored 473 goals in 440 official matches for Benfica. More goals than games, for fifteen years.

Eusébio da Silva Ferreira was born on 25 January 1942 in Lourenço Marques, in what was then Portuguese Mozambique and is now Maputo. His father was a white railway worker from Angola; his mother was a black Mozambican woman. He was the fourth of five children.

His father died of tetanus in 1950, when Eusébio was eight.

Wikipedia describes the childhood in one sentence: "Growing up in an extremely poor neighbourhood, he used to skip school classes to play barefoot football with his friends on improvised pitches and using stuffed socks as footballs."

Juventus found him at fifteen. He told the story himself: "One of their scouts, who had been a famous Italian goalkeeper for them, saw me and told them that there was a boy with a potential, that it would be good to take advantage while I was still unknown. Juventus proposed but my mum never wanted to hear anything from anyone."

He was playing for Sporting Lourenço Marques, a feeder club of Sporting Lisbon. Benfica signed him anyway, and Sporting disputed whether that was legal at all.

He arrived in Lisbon on 15 December 1960, eighteen years old. In April 1961 Benfica hid him in Lagos, on the Algarve coast, for twelve days, under the name Ruth Malosso, because they were afraid Sporting would take him.

He phoned home from there: "Mum, I'm going back because there are men here who want to hurt me."

His own account of the dispute is unsentimental. "Benfica wanted to pay me in a contract to go to Portugal while Sporting wanted to take me as a junior player for the experience with no monetary reward. Benfica made a nice approach. They went to speak to my mum, my brother, and offered money for three years. My brother asked for double and they paid it. Sporting tried to spread the story that I'd stitched them up, but it was the other way round, because they tried to take me for free while Benfica were willing to pay."

The transfer was completed in the early hours of 13 May 1961. Ten days later he played a friendly against Atlético Clube de Portugal and scored a hat-trick.

His first full season ended in a European Cup final against Real Madrid, in Amsterdam, in front of 61,257 people.

Puskás scored a hat-trick for Real — 18, 23, 39 minutes — and still lost. Benfica won 5–3. Eusébio scored twice.

Mário Coluna, the Benfica captain who had taken the young Eusébio under his wing, scored the equaliser at 3–3 and was due to take the penalty that made it 4–3. Wikipedia records what happened instead: the youngster "politely asked if he could shoot it instead."

He was twenty years old and had just taken a penalty off his captain in a European Cup final, and scored it.

Benfica reached three more finals in the next six years and lost all three.

North Korea had already knocked out Italy. Twenty-five minutes into the quarter-final they were beating Portugal 3–0.

Eusébio scored in the 27th minute. He scored a penalty in the 43rd. He scored again in the 56th, and another penalty in the 59th. José Augusto added a fifth on 80. Portugal won 5–3.

Three days later England beat them 2–1 in the semi-final at Wembley, Bobby Charlton scoring twice. Eusébio scored a penalty in the 82nd minute — the goal that ended England's run of seven consecutive clean sheets and 708 minutes without conceding — a run that began well before the tournament, since only 442 minutes of it had been played in it. He caught the ball out of the net, and saluted Gordon Banks.

He walked off the pitch in tears at the end, and was comforted by both sets of players. It is the most reproduced image of that World Cup after the trophy itself.

In the third-place match against the Soviet Union he scored again, from the penalty spot, and went to salute Lev Yashin. That was his ninth goal of the tournament. He won the Golden Boot by three clear of anyone else, and set a record for the most penalties scored at a World Cup.

Portugal had never reached a World Cup before. They finished third.

Benfica went back to Wembley for the 1968 European Cup final against Manchester United. With the score at 1–1 in the last seconds of normal time, Eusébio was through and Alex Stepney saved it. United won 4–1 in extra time.

What he did next is on his Wikipedia page for a reason: he stopped and applauded Stepney as the goalkeeper threw the ball back into play.

His knees went. He played on into the North American leagues — Boston, Toronto, Las Vegas, New Jersey — and scored the winning goal in Soccer Bowl '76 for Toronto Metros-Croatia. He retired in 1979 and spent the rest of his life as an ambassador for Portuguese football — though the table above still carries a Buffalo Stallions row for 1979–80, and no source checked reconciles the two.

He died at home on 5 January 2014, of heart failure, aged seventy-one. The government declared three days of national mourning. Hundreds of thousands came to pay tribute. On 9 January his coffin was carried around the pitch at the Estádio da Luz, which was one of the things he had asked for.

He was later moved to the National Pantheon on a unanimous vote of parliament — the first footballer ever buried there. A year to the day after his death, the avenue in front of Benfica's stadium was renamed Avenida Eusébio da Silva Ferreira.

His statue had been unveiled outside that stadium on his fiftieth birthday, in 1992, while he was alive to see it.

The Other column is the Intercontinental Cup — one match against Peñarol in 1961 and two against Santos in 1962. It was missing here until 2026-09-19. The 1960–61 cup goal was missing with it: the source records a goal in his single cup appearance that season, which is the goal that made the cup column read 96 against its own total of 97.

Three of the early seasons do not add across: those years include a competition this table does not break out, and it is counted in the total rather than in any column. The Total column is the one every figure on this page is built on, and it reconciles.

1967–68: forty-two league goals in twenty-four league games. Fifty in thirty-five across everything.

Twelve caps and twelve goals in 1966 alone. He was Portugal's leading scorer of all time until Pauleta passed him in 2005.

Individual: Ballon d'Or 1965, runner-up 1962 and 1966. World Cup Golden Boot 1966, nine goals. European Golden Shoe 1968 — the first winner — and 1973. Portuguese league top scorer seven times: 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1970, 1973. European Cup top scorer 1965, 1966 and 1968. BBC Overseas Sports Personality of the Year, 1966.

Alfredo Di Stéfano, after his death: "For me Eusébio will always be the best player of all time."

António Simões, who played beside him at Benfica, put the dependency more exactly than any tribute: "With Eusébio maybe we could be European Champions, without him maybe we could win the league."

The number to sit with is 473 goals in 440 matches — a goal and a bit every time he played, for a decade and a half, in a league that took European Cups seriously and a team that reached five finals.

The other number is 47 goals in the European Cup itself, which stood second only to Di Stéfano for many years. The table's Europe column reads 57 because it also counts the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup.

But the thing that made him loved rather than merely admired happened in defeat, twice, on the same pitch in London. He applauded the goalkeeper who had just denied him a European Cup, and two years earlier he had walked off Wembley in tears after a World Cup semi-final and been consoled by the team that knocked him out.

He came from a barefoot childhood in Mozambique, was hidden under a false name so a rival club could not take him, and ended up the first footballer buried in Portugal's national pantheon.