How a Portuguese football coach became a British spy

In his new book Bring Me That Horizon: A Journey to the Soul of Portuguese Football, Miguel Lourenço Pereira leads us on an absorbing quest into the heart and soul of Portuguese football. From Eusébio's glorious career to European Cup finals, last-minute title winners and Cristiano Ronaldo, it's a must-read for football fans.

In this extract, Miguel Lourenço Pereira explains how the Portuguese football coach Cândido de Oliveira became a British spy.

Bill Shankly’s famous “life and death” statement could have been inspired by Oliveira, because for him it almost was something of the sort. In 1942, while Europe was at war, Salazar kept Portugal a neutral country. Lisbon became one of the world’s espionage capitals in such a way that even Ian Fleming used most of the people he encountered there as role models for his famous James Bond saga. Among them was a man mostly known for his passion for the game.

As a worker at Portugal’s Post Office company, Cândido de Oliveira had access to letters and telegrams that were sent from the local authorities to Nazi Germany. Earlier that year he was approached by British intelligence, who asked for his collaboration to access that valued information. Oliveira couldn’t say no.

As a Democrat, he had already endured a decade of dictatorship and truly believed that the Allies would evict Salazar from power once they toppled Hitler, as they promised him. For months he passed on secret information until he was eventually discovered and arrested by one of his former players, Portugal’s renowned goalkeeper, now turned secret police officer, Antonio Roquette.

Luckily for him, his past as a player, coach and journalist made him too much of a public figure to be tried publicly. Instead, Oliveira was sent to a prison camp in Tarrafal, on one of the islands of Cape Verde, near the coast of Africa. For two years he was condemned to forced labour as he watched people around him die, including the then-leader of the Portuguese Communist Party. He later wrote a book on the dreadful experience.

When the Allies disembarked in Normandy, turning the tide of the war in their favour, the British government enquired about the fate of their former collaborator. Oliveira was swiftly brought back to Portugal and the government even offered him his old job back. On a point of principle, he refused and then joined two old-time friends, António Ribeiro dos Reis and Vicente de Melo, in founding Portugal’s most celebrated sports newspaper, A Bola.

The life of a spy was not what Oliveira was best at. Football was. Like so many poor children or orphans he was brought up at the Casa Pia, a public institution that offered education for the more needy. He played for Benfica in the club’s early years and then became a key figure in founding a football club within Casa Pia.

Oliveira was so well respected that at Portugal’s first international match, in Madrid, he was named team captain. He would later coach the national side during the 1928 Olympics and managed two of the Big Three, with remarkable success while at Sporting. He was even the first Portuguese manager working abroad, briefly coaching Flamengo.

His knowledge of the game was second to none. A regular traveller, he befriended Herbert Chapman and Hugo Meisl, translated several football books into Portuguese and even wrote some himself. He was one of the first national coaches to use the WM formation, after seeing Arsenal play at Highbury, and to implement training sessions with the ball, anticipating Mourinho by more than 60 years.

His love of the game was such that, even when ill, he decided to travel to Sweden to cover the World Cup for his newspaper. There he fell in love with Pelé and wrote about the futuristic tactical approach of the South Americans who, by then, were already playing with a flat back four.

On June 23, he suffered a final blow to the lungs and was eventually pronounced dead at Stockholm’s hospital.

His greatest disappointment in the later stages of his life was that the British never fulfilled their promise to remove Salazar from office and restore a democratic government. Until the end he fought against censorship in his newspaper, always searching for metaphors to evade the censor’s blue pencil.

The regime outlived him by 16 years but when the Portuguese federation created a Super Cup between the league and cup winners, his name was chosen for the trophy.

This is an extract from Bring Me That Horizon: A Journey to the Soul of Portuguese Football by Miguel Lourenço Pereira, published by Pitch Publishing

Banner photo: Cândido de Oliveira (jornaltornado.pt)