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challenged local groups. The growing number of settlers, some of whom had played the sport in the metropolis, contributed to the game’s development. At the beginning of the century, several clubs emerged, projects that, albeit brief, expressed a growing associative mindset.⁵¹

      Football matches integrated a set of spectacles promoted by urban life—the leisure activities of a burgeoning community.⁵² Teatro Variéta, inaugurated in 1912, featured opera performances and cinema, and included a dance hall. In 1913 Teatro Gil Vicente opened with theatrical plays, but it also doubled as a cinema. By 1916, Lourenço Marques already had thirty bars and pubs.⁵³ The 1912 census of the city counted 13,353 inhabitants, including 5,324 Europeans, of which 1,299 were non-Portuguese. The city’s outskirts had 12,726 inhabitants.⁵⁴ During this period, public buildings, commercial establishments, leisure areas, banks, and hotels were built. The Polana Hotel, still the most sumptuous hotel in Maputo, was inaugurated in 1922 in the eastern part of the city, an almost deserted area whose grounds had been allotted to private investors.⁵⁵ There, before the hotel existed, the British community had built a field where football and nine-hole golf could be played.⁵⁶ Downtown, near the penitentiary, the English Club improvised a cricket field where members of Clube Indo-Português (a Goan association founded in 1921) also played.⁵⁷

      Lourenço Marques grew from the coastal area, site of its initial urban street network, toward the interior. The vast majority of the native population, arriving in the city from the country, went only as far as the suburbs or, in fewer cases, impoverished transitional neighborhoods such as Alto Maé or Alto de Maxaquene.⁵⁸ Downtown and the central part of the city were dominated by commerce and administration. The industrial area was west of the city, bounded by the railway. Part of the working population was employed here, in the railway, port, national press, civil construction, tram, or metalwork industries. Each residential area reflected its inhabitants’ class, national origin, and ethnic differences. The European population concentrated in Ponta Vermelha and Polana, especially the ruling class. The Central neighborhood, more heterogeneous, mostly housed Indian traders.⁵⁹

      The line tracing the beginning of the modern city was an avenue that cut across it, parallel to the coast, almost from one end to the other.⁶⁰ The football pitches of the most popular clubs in town were built along this avenue. These are the clubs that today still exist in Mozambique: Sporting de Lourenço Marques (est. 1920, presently Maxaquene), Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques (1921), and Clube Ferroviário (1924). Given their location, these clubs became known collectively as clubes da baixa (downtown teams). The hierarchy of the football game moved, from the top to the bottom of the pyramid, from downtown to the suburbs. 1.^o de Maio, a club founded in 1917 by a group of railway workers, completed the quartet that for a long period monopolized official competitions.⁶¹ Grupo Sportivo Indo-português (1921) was one of the more active participants in these early competitions and one of the chief promoters of cricket. Football’s growth in Lourenço Marques justified the creation, in 1923, of the Associação de Foot-Ball da Província de Mozambique, which in 1926 became the Associação de Futebol de Lourenço Marques (AFLM, Lourenço Marques Football Association), an institution affiliated with what was then known as the União Portuguesa de Futebol (Portuguese Football Union). The new association promoted “association football,” as stipulated in the rules of the International Board.⁶²

      In 1924, in the suburbs of Lourenço Marques, another football association was created, the Associação de Futebol Africana (African Football Association). Gathering a significant group of clubs, the AFA organized its own competitions, which became elements of a vigorous urban life growing on the outskirts of the city. The existence of two football associations exposed processes of discrimination also manifest in the distribution of football fans in the downtown stadium. Born in 1929, Mário Wilson, one of the first Mozambicans to play in the metropole, recalls that Africans “could watch the game but they had to be in a specific section for Africans . . . and, for those that were down-and-out, not even that was possible.”

      These venues were only one among many urban spaces where a policy of social segregation was in place. Indígenas were barred from many areas of the cement city after certain hours: leisure spaces (beaches, cinemas, theaters, cafés, gardens), state institutions (administration, courts, the mail, schools, and hospitals), public transport (trains, trams), even its very streets.⁶³ Colonial racism affected not only the indígenas but also all people that had been subject to racialization in the capital, such as Chinese, Indians, and assimilated mestiços.⁶⁴

      While tennis, sailing, and motorsports continued to be restricted to Lourenço Marques’s colonial bourgeoisie, football became more popular, though its expansion, albeit still limited, did not drive away Portugal’s colonial elite from the sports associative movement. Clube Ferroviário, although founded by a group of workers, was controlled by the heads of the railway administration. The directors of Sporting Clube de Lourenço Marques, associated with the colonial military and police power, came from the various organs of the colonial administration.⁶⁵ Desportivo, founded on the initiative of civil servants and traders, was sponsored by local notables, becoming the most representative among those supported by the “old settlers.”⁶⁶ Sponsorship was prestigious to the clubs; likewise, the associations’ popularity improved the reputation of these local figures. The management of sports clubs by notables, such as industrialists, civil servants, traders, lawyers, and bankers, established itself in much the same way it had previously in other colonial contexts.⁶⁷ As the Portuguese associative movement grew in Lourenço Marques, English influence weakened.⁶⁸

       Downtown Associations, Clubs, and Players

      The formation of football clubs benefited from an associative dynamic, which arose in Lourenço Marques during the first decades of the century. This was particularly prominent in the period of the First Portuguese Republic (1910–26), when class associations, cooperatives, mutualist associations, savings banks, and other associations were created.⁶⁹ The associative network facilitated the social integration of settlers, many of them poor, having arrived in Africa without a penny to their name. The welfare and mutualist associations sought to socially integrate the urban populations. In a different and more impromptu manner, recreational and sports associations enabled the settlers to come into contact with organized personal networks, which often reproduced a metropolitan sense of belonging, especially, within this context, of a regional nature.⁷⁰ On the other hand, some sporting clubs became delegations of Portugal’s main football clubs. Grupo Desportivo de Lourenço Marques was affiliated with Sport Lisboa e Benfica (est. 1904);⁷¹ Sporting de Lourenço Marques was affiliated with Sporting Clube de Portugal (1906). In the following decades, delegations of these clubs would spread throughout the territory.⁷²

      Clube Ferroviário had a different origin. Formed in a period of intense labor unrest⁷³ among a group of railway workers, it was sponsored by the railway company, a powerful industrial enterprise whose expansion went hand in hand with the formation of a regional network sustained by South Africa’s economic growth. The company’s bureaucratic organization and the control it tried to exert over its employees’ spare time (among other things, by assembling a music band and setting up a library), turned Clube Ferroviário into an example of industrial paternalism, a way of managing the working force typical of contexts where relations of production are more developed. This type of management, common in Europe since the end of the nineteenth century,⁷⁴ was later employed in some regions of sub-Saharan Africa, mainly in South Africa’s industrialized areas.⁷⁵ Throughout the Portuguese colonial world, the use of sports as an instrument of labor management emerged across various contexts. Ferroviário, along with the network of delegations it founded throughout the territory, became the most precocious and relevant example of the relationship established between football clubs and public and private companies in Mozambique. Changes in the colonial economic infrastructure during the period following the Second World War strengthened the connection between sports practice and businesses’ labor policies framed by a private corporatism sponsored by the state.⁷⁶ In many ways the use of organized leisure as an instrument of social integration was pioneered by public and private companies and not directly by the central state.

      AFLM

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