Mwepu Ilunga knew exactly what he was doing

The clip is usually shown as a punchline. Brazil are awarded a free kick during their group match against Zaire at the Parkstadion in Gelsenkirchen. Before the kick can be taken, Zaire's Mwepu Ilunga breaks from the defensive wall and hammers the ball away downfield. The referee cautions him — a yellow card. He is not sent off. The clip cuts there, and the laughter follows.

Ilunga, who was born on 22 August 1949 and died on 8 May 2015, spent years correcting the record. He was an experienced international in a side that had qualified for a World Cup. He told L'Equipe, plainly: 'I wanted a red card.'

The caution was not the outcome he needed. A yellow card kept him on the pitch. He wanted to leave it.

The protest had been building since Zaire's opening match, a 2-0 defeat to Scotland. Ilunga said the players were content with that result. What changed the mood, he said, was the discovery that a bonus owed to the squad had been intercepted. He blamed people close to the government of President Mobutu Sese Seko — the man who had ruled Zaire, the country now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo, since 1965.

Ilunga described his reasoning in words reported by ESPN: 'I'm not playing anymore. Why would I stay on the field and take the risk of not returning home when the others — the people who took our money — are watching us peacefully from the stands?'

The fear of not returning home was not abstract. According to Ilunga, presidential guards were sent to the squad with a message: if Zaire lost to Brazil by four goals or more, the players would not be allowed back into the country. That is Ilunga's account of what he was told. It is what he said, reported and attributed to him. It has not been independently established as fact.

What is established is what he did and why he said he did it. He ran out of the wall and kicked the ball away because he wanted to be removed from a situation he regarded as dangerous and unjust. The referee gave him a yellow card instead, and he stayed on the field.

The clip has been replayed for fifty years as comedy. Ilunga's own explanation — available in his words, on record — reframes it as something else entirely: a man trying to withdraw his labour under duress, using the only mechanism available to him on a football pitch, and being denied even that.

The story the clip is usually told as is not the story Mwepu Ilunga said he was living.