'Proud father' Gil Gomes reveals a unique family tale

Angel Gomes's dad recalls his own remarkable football journey which took him from Angola to Salford via Hendon

- Rob Draper

Where do you begin with the extraordinary football heritage of Angel Gomes? Perhaps in Lille, where he is thriving in the Champions League, having left Manchester United in 2020. Alternatively, you could go back to Lisbon, where his father, Gil, arrived as a 15-year-old to make his way in the world with Benfica, trained with Eusébio and won an Under-20 World Cup with Portugal.

Or, you could return to Luanda, Angola, where Gil was born and raised and learned the game playing barefoot on dirt pitches. However you tell the tale, the rich cast of characters that feature along the way, from Eusébio to Ron Atkinson, Sven-Goran Eriksson to Luís Figo, is astonishing.

On one level, the story of the player who may yet be England's long-awaited controlling midfielder might be said to originate in Clarendon Park, Salford, the sports field hemmed in between the M602 and the A6, where he grew up kicking a ball amid the high rises.

Yet you could equally take in Jacksonville, Florida, where Gil first met Dennis Viollet, a survivor of the Munich air disaster, the family's first Manchester United connection. But it's probably best to return to the Prenda bairro in Luanda, a poor neighbourhood adjacent to the international airport where the jumbo jets swoop low over high-density housing and extraordinary football matches on dirt pitches are watched by hundreds of animated locals.

"I come from a poor family and was born in Prenda, Luanda," says Gil, still a friend of Figo, Rui Costa and João Pinto, teammates in that Portugal Under-20 team. His parents were born in the provincial Angolan city Malanje and, like many, headed for the capital in search of better opportunities. That is how Gil came to learn his football in the extraordinary games around the Prenda bairro, where kickabouts have the intensity of a World Cup final.