Cândido de Oliveira: The Most Important Figure in Early Portuguese Football

Each Portuguese football season opens with the Supertaça Cândido de Oliveira. The ‘Supercup’ is a curtain-raiser played at Portugal’s neutral grounds between the previous season’s champions and cup winners, or losing finalists, in case of a double. It’s the Portuguese equivalent of the Community (Charity) Shield in England and it’s named after one of the central figures in early Portuguese football. Meet Cândido Plácido Fernandes de Oliveira; footballer, coach, journalist…and secret agent… 

In my debut book, Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World, I dedicate quite a sizeable section of the Portugal chapter to a small Lisbon football club called Casa Pia Atlético Clube. The club was founded in 1920 by former students of the Real Casa Pia de Lisboa (Royal Pious House of Lisbon) orphanage. The establishment was key to opening up football to the working classes in Portugal. As in England and many other countries, football had hitherto been a reserve for upper class gentlemen with leisure time on their hands. By teaching boys of all backgrounds to play as part of their schooling, Casa Pia changed all that.

Cândido de Oliveira from the Alentejo region of Portugal’s interior was orphaned young and was sent to Casa Pia. He excelled at football and in 1914 was selected to play for Sport Lisboa e Benfica – already part of Lisbon’s elite footballing duopoly alongside Sporting Clube de Portugal, despite both being less than a decade old.

In 1920, de Oliveira co-founded Casa Pia Atlético Clube, along with 17 other former alumni of the eponymous orphanage. The new club stormed to the Lisbon regional championship title unbeaten in its first season. The other founders included journalists, poets, writers, an Olympian swimmer, and future Portuguese international António Pinho, who was capped 12 times.

International calling

Like its Iberian neighbour in Spain, Portugal was relatively late to the international scene. Cândido de Oliveira captained Portugal in its first international – a 3-1 defeat to Spain at the Campo de la Calle O’Donnell in Madrid in 1921. Despite being only 25, was de Oliveira’s only international appearance as a player. 

He switched to coaching, leading the Portuguese national side to the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic tournament. The Portuguese had to play a preliminary qualifying round against Chile and trailed 2-0 within half an hour. However, Portugal rallied and scored twice before the break with goals from Vitor Silva of Benfica and Pepe Soares of Belenenses. Two more goals in the second half saw de Oliveira’s side through to the tournament proper. 

In the first round, Portugal beat Yugoslavia 2-1 with a late goal from Belenenses’ Augusto Silva. This late win prompted a pitch invasion by ecstatic Portuguese fans, who hugged and kissed their national heroes as they left the field of play. 

On to the quarter-final with Egypt where a tiny crowd of less than 4,000 had assembled at Amsterdam’s Olympic Stadium. Portugal were undone by Egypt’s pace and succumbed 2-1. De Oliveira resigned following the shock defeat. 

The British connection

England’s leading side of the early 1930s was Arsenal under the tutorship of Herbert Chapman. De Oliveira came to London to train under Chapman and went back to Portugal to work in the postal service. He also returned to the national team set up as coach. With a grasp of both Portuguese and English, plus an antipathy towards the right-wing Salazar regime, de Oliveira was a perfect recruit for British intelligence. Lisbon was a hotbed of espionage during World War II; Portugal was neutral but as a base for German agents, exiles, and refugees heading to the Americas, there was a lot going on. 

De Oliveira was detained by the Portuguese authorities and sent to the notorious Tarrafal prison camp on the Cape Verde islands. Here, prisoners were expected to die slowly due to sickness, but de Oliveira survived and, as the tide of war turned against the fascist nations, so Salazar reluctantly released him after the British asked after his whereabouts.

In 1945, de Oliveira co-founded leading Portuguese sports newspaper A Bola (The Ball) and combined coaching with journalism. He won the Portuguese title twice with Sporting Clube but died of pneumonia in Stockholm while covering the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, aged 61.

While Portugal’s national and club sides did not really make waves on the international stage until the early 1960s, the groundwork to Portuguese football success – particularly opening the game up to the working classes – was laid long before. And central to that process was Cândido de Oliveira.

Cândido de Oliveira features both of my books.  Origin Stories: The Pioneers Who Took Football to the World is a country-by-country guide of how the game got started, including Portugal, and The Defiant: A History of Football Against Fascism covers resistance to dictatorships, including Salazar’s Estado Novo.