Weak and frail, the player sent off at the 1974 World Cup after being wrongly punished for kicking a referee up the backside is struggling to make ends meet

Poor and wheelchair-bound, Ndaye Mulamba has just been told he faces eviction from his rented home in Kinshasa, 44 years after he was ejected from the World Cup for kicking a referee up the backside.

Mulamba is nearly 70 and that may be a surprise if the last time you heard mention of him was when a minute’s silence was held in his honour before a match at the 1998 Africa Cup of Nations, when the players of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burkina Faso marked his “death” in an accident at an Angolan diamond mine. That turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. Mulamba has never even been to Angola.

Nor has he ever kicked a referee up the backside but that was the offence for which he was sent off at the 1974 World Cup, when the career of Mulamba and his Zaire team-mates lurched from glory to tragic farce. Tragedy has stalked glory throughout his life.

Former Zaire defender Mwepu Ilunga dies aged 66 after long illness Read more

The red card was also a case of mistaken identity. Mulamba was shown it when his team were 4-0 down to Yugoslavia, who went on to win 9-0. In the 23rd minute the referee, Omar Delgado of Colombia, was scolding a Zaire player for a foul when he felt a boot up his derrière. He turned round and sent off Mulamba, whose bewilderment greatly amused commentators who did not realise that the referee had got the wrong man and interpreted his perplexity as further evidence of the naivety of the first team from sub-Saharan Africa to reach the World Cup. By the next day’s newspapers it was the referee who was being ridiculed. But Fifa backed its man and banned Mulamba for a year.

The real culprit was Mwepu Ilunga. Yes, the same man who would earn lasting notoriety in Zaire’s next match when he rushed out of a defensive wall and whacked the ball downfield so that Brazil could not take a free-kick. People still laugh at that now.

Ilunga broke the rules deliberately to protest against authorities who were not just depriving him and his fellow Leopards of their livelihoods, but also threatening their lives.

The Leopards of Zaire had travelled to West Germany as national heroes and African champions. Earlier in 1974 they had swaggered to victory in the Africa Cup of Nations, with Mulamba scoring nine goals in the tournament, a record that still stands. His goalscoring feats had already earned him a slew of nicknames, such as Volvo and Mustang – because of his speed – but most commonly Mutumbula, after a deadly nocturnal spirit reputed to inflict misery on those he visited. One local newspaper even dubbed him Hitler (“because of his destructive power”) after he scored six goals in a cup match. That tag didn’t stick.

The squad were presented with brand new Volkswagen Passats after their Nations Cup triumph but never saw the win bonuses they had been promised. Bonuses were their only income, none of them earning wages from playing. Nor did they get their bonuses for reaching the World Cup. Which is why the mood grew mutinous during the tournament.

They performed quite well in their first match, a 2-0 defeat by Scotland. After that they were assured that a sports ministry envoy was on the way with their overdue bonuses. The cash never showed up. The team talk before the Yugoslavia game was given not by their manager, the former Yugoslavia goalkeeper Blagoje Vidinic, but by an emissary of Zaire’s president Mobutu Sese Seko. “We have reason to believe that the Yugoslav authorities persuaded the coach to reveal your game plan so we have decided to put him in isolation and make some changes,” said the emissary, as recalled by Mulamba in Claire Raynaud’s book La Mort M’Attendra. So now the regime was not only refusing to pay the players but in effect sabotaging their performances. Well, two could play that game.

Mobutu warned after the Yugoslavia match that that if they lost by more than three goals against Brazil, there would be hell to pay. They lost 3-0. When they returned home the Leopards were held captive in the presidential palace for four days while their fate was decided. Eventually they were allowed to rejoin their families.

Mulamba played for the Kinshasa side AS Vita until he was 38 and then made ends meet with small coaching gigs. In 1994 the Confederation of African Football honoured him for the record he set 20 years previously, inviting him to a ceremony in Tunis where he was presented with a medal. A cigarette company paid for his suit for the event. He returned proud, happy to have been remembered. A few days later four masked men in military uniforms broke into his home and demanded the medal, plus money. The commotion awoke Mulamba’s nine-year-old son, Tridon, who ran in to help. A soldier hit the child with a rifle butt, killing him. Mulamba was shot twice in a left leg, marched out, beaten up and thrown off a bridge.

He spent eight months in hospital before being transferred to South Africa for further care. He stayed there, living penniless in a township, for years.

Now he is back in Kinshasa. “Physically he is frail but he still has the mentality of a champion,” says Alain Makengo, a football-loving lawyer who several years ago began lobbying for Mulamba and his former team-mates to be given support that would allow them to spend their twilight years in dignity. “They brought such joy and honour to the country and inspired so many young people that it is terrible to see some of them in such precarious situations,” says Makengo, who succeeded in getting the Congolese government to pay the players a stipend. Mulamba’s equates to around £175 per month. His rent costs slightly less than that. “If he pays it, how does he eat?” asks Makengo.