Eusébio - “The Black Panther”
Eusébio da Silva Ferreira, nicknamed “The Black Panther”, or “The Black Pearl”, is popularly known as Eusébio. He was born on 25th January, 1942 in Lourenço Marques (now its known as Maputo), Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).
In 1961, Eusébio joined Benfica when he was just 19 years old. He played for Benfica for almost 15 years. And he is the club’s all time top scorer. In 1962 Benfica defeated Real Madrid CF (5-3) in European Cup’s Final. In that final Eusébio scored 2 superb goals. Not only that, in 1963, 1965 and 1968 Benfica finished as the runners-up.
In the year 1965, he was honored with the European Footballer of the Year award. He was the seven times Portuguese First Division’s top scorer (from 1964 to 1973). This is not all, there are many more achievement like,
1) 9th best footballer of the 20th century - A poll was conduted by IFFHS (International Federation of Football History & Statistics) and Eusébio was elected.
2) Golden Boot Award - In 1968 he received the Golden Boot Award as Europe’s leading scorer.
3) Golden Player of Portugal - On November 2003 in UEFA’s Jubilee celebration, he was selected as Golden Player of Portugal by the Portuguese Football Federation as their most outstanding player of the past 50 years.
Its true that a team is not complete without 11 players but Eusébio’s outstading performance not only helped Benfica to gain 11 league championships (1961, 1963-65, 1967-69, 1971-73, 1975) but also won 5 cups (1962, 1964, 1969, 1970, 1972).

