07 | HENRIQUE BEN DAVID AND THE ATLANTIC

Santiago Bentancur crossed the Atlantic because he wanted to. At thirty-four, he had left Montevideo for Portugal in pursuit of an opportunity, carrying his education, his ambitions and the belief that he might build something of his own in a country whose football he admired. It was a decision made with a degree of freedom that is easy to take for granted when discussing the movement of people through football. For many of the African players who arrived in Portugal during the colonial period, the circumstances were considerably more complicated. Their journeys were shaped by an empire that had determined where they could live, work and study, and by inequalities that football could sometimes offer a route around without ever making them disappear. The Atlantic connected these lives, but it did not make them equivalent.

I have been trying to understand what that history means for Atlético, and one name has repeatedly brought me back to the club itself: Henrique Ben David.

Born in Mindelo, Cape Verde, in 1926, Ben David arrived in Lisbon in 1946, aged nineteen. His route into Portuguese football began at Unidos de Lisboa before taking him to CUF Barreiro, the industrial club on the other side of the Tagus. After two seasons at CUF, Atlético signed him, and he would spend eight seasons at Tapadinha. He scored 98 goals for the club, helped Atlético reach the 1949 Taça de Portugal final and contributed to a third-place finish in the 1949–50 First Division. He also won six caps for Portugal.

It is a remarkable career, particularly for someone whose name is not widely recognised beyond the history of the clubs and football institutions with which he was associated. Most people who know something of Portuguese football’s African connections will recognise Eusébio, born in Mozambique before moving to Portugal and becoming one of Benfica’s defining players, a star of the 1960s and an international symbol of Portuguese football. Ben David offers something different. His story is not that of a global celebrity, but of a player whose working life became intertwined with Atlético during a formative period in the club’s history. He was not simply passing through Lisbon on his way to somewhere more prestigious. For eight seasons, Tapadinha was his footballing home.

That matters when thinking about what makes a club. Histories tend to be organised around trophies, famous players and defining matches, but the identity of an institution is also built by the people who spend their working lives there, whose contributions may be considerable without ever becoming famous. Ben David’s 98 goals are a tangible measure of his importance to Atlético; his presence also connects the club’s story to Cape Verde and to a wider history of movement across the Portuguese-speaking world. A man born in Mindelo became part of the life of a Lisbon club, and part of Portuguese football itself.

But we cannot understand that movement without looking at the circumstances that made it possible.

Football spread through Portugal’s African territories during the colonial period through a mixture of schools, missions, settlers, businesses and labour networks. The game became embedded in local communities, where it developed its own traditions and meanings, even as the institutions through which it travelled were often tied to colonial power. As the twentieth century progressed, talented players began moving from clubs in Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau to the metropolitan game. Portugal offered access to a larger footballing stage, but the routes between the territories and the metropole existed within a political system that denied those territories equal standing.

It would be misleading to describe every player’s experience in the same terms. Some saw football as a route towards professional success, better living conditions or opportunities unavailable at home; individual ambition and personal agency mattered, and the achievements of players who made those journeys should not be reduced to the circumstances surrounding them. Yet the choices available to people are shaped by the conditions in which they must make them. Colonial rule created inequalities in wealth, employment and opportunity, while migration could offer a means of navigating those inequalities. The existence of a path into professional football did not make the system that produced it fair.

Nor did success on the pitch resolve the contradictions. A player could become a national hero while coming from a territory whose people remained subject to an unequal political order. Football could offer recognition, mobility and a public platform, but it could also allow institutions and nations to celebrate individual achievement without confronting the wider conditions behind it. Both things could be true at once. To acknowledge the opportunities that football created is not to excuse colonialism; to examine the structures that constrained these players is not to diminish what they achieved within them.

The later histories of Ben David and Eusébio belong to different moments in this wider story, and their careers should not be treated as interchangeable examples. What connects them is the way football made movement visible: players crossed from African territories into Portuguese clubs, bringing their ability and ambition into institutions that would be changed by their presence. Following decolonisation, these connections did not simply disappear. The old networks evolved, and Portugal remained an important destination and gateway for players seeking opportunities in European football. The history is neither a straightforward tale of exploitation nor a triumphant story of football overcoming prejudice. It is a record of people making lives within systems that offered opportunity unevenly, and of a sport whose development cannot be separated from the political and social worlds around it.

Portuguese is now an official language across nine countries spanning Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, from Portugal and Brazil to Cape Verde, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea and Timor-Leste. The Community of Portuguese Language Countries, founded in Lisbon in 1996, gives those connections an institutional form, although a shared official language does not mean a shared culture, political outlook or historical experience. The distances between these countries are enormous, and the differences between them matter. For Atlético, this wider world is a context worth understanding, not a ready-made identity to claim. As the club grows, there may be opportunities to explore those connections more deliberately, but there is no need to turn them into a recruitment strategy before Santi has even begun his first senior season.

For now, the important thing is what this history reveals about Atlético itself. The club’s story cannot be contained within the boundaries of Alcântara, even though the neighbourhood remains central to its identity. People arrive carrying histories of their own, and the institutions they join become part of those histories in turn. Ben David came from Mindelo to Lisbon, passed through Unidos and CUF, and spent eight seasons scoring goals for Atlético. His career connected places that might otherwise appear distant from one another, not through an abstract idea of Lusophone unity, but through the ordinary work of being a footballer.

Santi has crossed the same ocean under very different circumstances, and he has no reason to imagine that his experience gives him an understanding of every journey that preceded his. What it might give him is a sense of humility about the histories that people bring with them, and an awareness that a club’s identity is never entirely the product of the place in which it plays. Atlético belongs to Alcântara, but its history has also been shaped by people who arrived from elsewhere, made a contribution and left something behind.

Henrique Ben David is one of them. Before thinking about what Atlético might become, it is worth understanding the people who helped make it what it is.