Footage of the first World Cup final in 1930 is scarce. The clips on YouTube are grainy,
brief and hard to follow, so it is impossible to tell what part José Leandro Andrade played
in Uruguay’s 4-2 victory over Argentina. According to accounts from those who were
there his form, speed and influence had started to wane; yet his name still appears in the
Fifa team of the tournament. That final would be his last appearance for Uruguay, the best
team in the world in the 1920s. There is a little more footage of him in the
Olympic Games of 1924 and 1928, in Paris and Amsterdam, both won by Uruguay. As Andrade
stylishly controls a pass and tricks his way past a Swiss defender in the Paris final he
is described by the commentator as “the Black Pearl, the first global star of international
football”. Uruguay were the first South American team
to play in Europe and Andrade was the first black international player seen by Europeans,
who were so impressed that a quarter of a million people applied for tickets for the
1928 Olympic final. Andrade played in the final of all three of
Uruguay’s great triumphs from 1924-1930, but Andrade was much more than just an exotic
footballer. He was born in Salto in the north of Uruguay,
also the home town of Luis Suárez and Edinson Cavani, in 1901. His mother was Argentinian
but there is no record of his father, so he was registered illegitimate. He would move
to Montevideo to live with an aunt, growing up in the Palermo district of the city. Money
was scarce but the black population was integrated, so Andrade would have played football with
boys from all social classes in the parks, and by the time he was a teenager would have
been welcome at the city’s clubs, which, unlike those in other parts of South America,
welcomed players of all races. Two questions, both subjective, constantly
arise when considering his life. First, how good a player was he? Second, how popular
or unpopular, famous or infamous, might he have been if television and social media had
existed when he was supposedly the central figure in the world’s best football team?
Given that the Olympic football tournament was the nearest thing to a World Cup before
Uruguay hosted the first one in 1930, Andrade’s achievements put him at the pinnacle of the
game. In the pre-television world he was football’s first international superstar. He was also
its first black superstar and its first rags-to-riches-to-rags player whose life story would make a good
film. He was the best-known player in Uruguay’s era of dominance, but whether he was the most
influential is harder to say. Some have called him ‘the first Pelé’. Others see him
more as ‘the first David Beckham’, a sporting sex symbol with a touch more style than substance.
Andrade was an accomplished musician, an expert tango dancer, a womaniser, a drinker, a party-
lover. He dressed like a dandy, he was elegant, arrogant, aloof and, off the pitch, ill-disciplined.
He upset a lot of people, causing great offence on one occasion when he failed to attend a
homecoming party arranged in his honour. When his playing career finished he could not hold
down a job: he began a descent into a syphilitic hell of poverty, alcoholism, blindness and
early death. He was 56 when he died in an asylum in Montevideo on 4 October 1957.
The Stanford University academic Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a respected multilingual philosopher
and expert in the history of literature and culture, believes Andrade was “responsible
more than anybody else in the first third of the twentieth century for putting football
on the map of international sports”. Gumbrecht tentatively describes Andrade as
a 1920s version of Zinedine Zidane, though in looks and bearing the 6ft half-back perhaps
more reminiscent of Frank Rijkaard. Gabriel Hanot, the former international player who
edited L’Équipe, said Uruguay’s 1924 players were “like thoroughbreds next to
farm horses” in comparison with north European players.
Andrade played mostly at half-back, from where he dominated games, busy in both halves of
the pitch. Gumbrecht wrote in ‘In Praise of Athletic Beauty’ in 2006: “All eyewitnesses
were enchanted with the effortless elegance in
his movements.” There was a “sensational athletic energy” about Andrade’s performances,
which “awakened strong waves of an almost erotic desire.”
One of Latin America’s great writers, the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, delved into sport
when he wrote Football in Sun and Shadow in the 1990s, the decade when France Football
magazine named Andrade as one of the top 10 most influential players in World Cup history.
In Galeano’s words, “Europe had never seen a black man play football. In the 1924
Olympics Andrade dazzled everyone... this rubber-bodied giant would sweep the ball downfield
without ever touching an adversary.” He dazzled them off the pitch too. Andrade
enjoyed the Paris night life, at times during the tournament and with vigour afterwards.
He met Colette, the great writer who wondered at his athleticism. He danced a tango with
Josephine Baker, the popular US entertainer who, like her partner, was known as ‘The
Black Pearl’. Whether the tango finished in the bedroom is, like so much about Andrade,
unclear. On one occasion, his close friend and teammate
Ángel Romano went to find him in the city. At an address Andrade had given him, a swanky
apartment, Romano found him surrounded by a group of semi-naked women. There were reports
that Andrade was later “abducted” by a wealthy French woman, who kept him in luxury
for weeks. Andrade returned to Uruguay many weeks later
a changed man, disembarking from the boat home in yellow gloves, an expensive coat,
leather boots, a silk cravat and a top hat. That was impressive, given that not so much
earlier he had been a street-corner newspaper vendor, shoeshine boy and, some said, gigolo.
Less impressive was his refusal to attend a party organised for him by Montevideo’s
black community. He never explained why. Teammates were not surprised, describing Andrade as
aloof and uncommunicative. During the Paris Games, Uruguay, with Andrade
performing what might nowadays be called a roaming creative midfield role, were such
an attraction their players were invited back to Europe a year later. Nacional, for whom
he played between 1925 and 1930, made a nine-country tour of the continent. More than 800,000 people
watched them. By the time of the 1928 Olympic Games, Uruguay were the must-see team, and
the previously amateur players would no doubt have been on very good expenses. It was at
these Games that Fifa decided to move away from amateurism and start a World Cup.
Andrade played only half of Nacional’s 1925 tour. He visited a doctor in Brussels and,
said a teammate, was told he had syphilis. For a while he disappeared to Paris, returning
to Montevideo two months later. On arrival, he told a reporter he was feeling “somewhat
ill” and would undergo a course of treatment. He played on having lost a little pace but
none of his skill. He declined to travel to Amsterdam as Uruguay sought to defend their
Olympic title, but when he waved the team farewell at the dockside, he changed his mind.
He took the next boat to Rio de Janeiro and joined the team. Uruguay won again, defeating
their perennial rivals and 1930 World Cup final victims, Argentina, in a replayed final.
In an earlier match Andrade ran into a goalpost and, some said, the injury was so serious
he was later blinded in one eye. The more likely explanation is that his blindness,
like other health problems, was caused by syphilis.
Dutch journalists were as impressed by Andrade as the French had been four years earlier.
“Andrade was such a great player and his colleagues were such aces that you felt sorry
to leave the stadium,” one of them wrote. Richard Hofmann, a Germany international who
played in Amsterdam, said of Andrade, “He was a football artist who could simply do
anything with the ball. He was always ahead with his thoughts by several moves.”
Andrade held his form long enough for that first World Cup two years later, starting
all the hosts’ games. After playing on for a couple of seasons at lesser clubs he slipped
into financial trouble in the 1930s but, as he had never endeared himself to the public,
attempts to raise money from a testimonial match failed.
In 1950, when the World Cup returned to South America, Andrade was invited to Brazil as
a guest of honour. His nephew, Victor Rodriguez Andrade, who added the second family name
in honour of his illustrious uncle, became the second Andrade to earn a World Cup winner’s
medal. The younger Andrade was also Uruguay’s best player in the 1954 World Cup, at which
they lost an extra-time semi-final against Hungary.
Aldo Mazzucchelli, a Uruguayan professor of Hispanic Culture at Brown University in Rhode
Island, believes racial integration in Uruguay was a significant factor in Andrade’s rise
to fame. Mazzucchelli has spent more time than most looking into the story of Andrade.
“He invented a particular manoeuvre called la tijera [the scissors], going to ground
with the left leg fully extended forward, and kicking the ball with his right foot,”
said Mazzucchelli. “It was apparently spectacular and elegant, and is mentioned obsessively
when it comes to him. “He had very good control with both legs,
even though he was right-footed, and was great at heading too. He never celebrated a goal.
Even though he was precise and efficient, he seemed as though he couldn’t care less
about anything. The German journalist and author Fritz Hack,
who featured Andrade in his 1972 book Kings of Football, went looking for this giant of
global football’s early years. For six days he trailed around Montevideo before finally
he found “the footballer with golden feet”. “Friends helped me,” Hack wrote. “But
what I found was horrible.” Andrade was living in a dilapidated basement flat, with
barely any furniture. He was alcoholic, blind in one eye, and unable to understand Hack’s
questions. That was in the autumn of 1956: just over a year later Andrade was dead, his
last days spent as a penniless drunk in an asylum.
Hack’s account of that last meeting between the player and a journalist records that Andrade’s
only possession appeared to be a shoebox full of medals.