ABSTRACT
Football in Goa is different. It has unique origins in the activities of an indigenized Catholic Church, in a history of emigration, in a forced industrialization, in the processes of decolonization and in a search for a means of protecting the difference described above of a Goa that found itself immersed in the Indian Union after 1961. The opening quotation emphasizes this difference, not just of Goan football, but of the region itself. It also hints at the origins of this difference as the writer is Oliveira Salazar, the Portuguese dictator and the last European ruler of Goa.
