Brazil's Pele bicycle kicks a ball during a game at an unknown location in 1968. Photo / AP
OPINION:
Among the hundreds of goals, the gravity-defying headers, the theatrical dummies, the electric-heeled dribbles and the shots from the halfway line that illuminated Pele’s career, there is one moment that summed him up as a player. And it was a pass.
You will know it. After all, it is perhaps the most famous pass in football history. It came in the final of the 1970 World Cup. Brazil were two goals up against a tiring Italy when Pele received the ball from Jairzinho on the edge of his opponents’ penalty area.
Bringing it immediately under control, he momentarily stood pushing the ball from right to left foot, as if assessing his options. Then, turning suddenly, he passed it apparently out into no-man’s land to the left of the Italian area.
As the ball moved into vacant space, what those of us watching on television could not see was Brazil’s right-back, Carlos Alberto, steaming in from beyond the edge of our screens to meet his perfectly weighted pass and hammer it into the net.
But Pele had seen him all right. And had delivered him a gilt-edged invitation to score. This was a moment of vision, a moment of precision, a moment of geometrical perfection that elevated the mere pass into a work of art.
And it was typical of Pele. The most prolific scorer in history he may have been, but he was no goal hanger. This was no Brazilian Zlatan Ibrahimovic. No samba Gary Lineker. No Copacabana Erling Haaland. As he proved in that final against Italy, then reckoned the foremost defensive side in the game, at his peak he was always on the move, always probing, never still, working tirelessly to find opportunity for himself and his colleagues.
And that pass to Carlos Alberto was no aberration; during the Mexican World Cup he scored four times but provided an astonishing six assists. He was involved in 53 per cent of Brazil’s 19 goals in the competition. In the side reckoned the finest international XI of all time, he was the one who provided the rhythm, the conductor, the man who made everyone else better.
He could do it all. When it became clear to the world he was dying, a beautifully edited compilation of his finest moments circulated on social media. It was a timely reminder of his ability, showing him doing everything his gifted successors became renowned for long before they did it. He was first with the Cruyff turn, first with the Rabona, first with every dazzle, twist and flick.
Of all the compulsions we football fans have to order and classify our game, the most compelling urge is the one to decide who is the greatest player of all time. And while Diego Maradona, Alfredo di Stefano, Johann Cruyff, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo all have legitimate claim to the title, Pele is the one who has long held the most pressing case to be considered the best.
The statistics alone are unequivocal: 77 goals in 92 international appearances (a record now tied by Neymar); 643 goals from 659 games for his club, Santos; two Copa Libertadores titles; three World Cup winners’ medals: it is a unique haul. But it was his unfailing ability to improve those around him that was his point of difference. This was the consummate team player.
“I was born for soccer,” he once said. “Just as Beethoven was born for music and Michelangelo was born to paint.” Indeed, he was kicking a ball – or more likely a bundle of knotted rags – almost as soon as he arrived on Earth.
Edson Arantes do Nascimento was raised in poverty in Bauru, Sao Paulo. Brazil might be the most ethnically diverse country in the world, but, even more than today, in the 1940s to be born black there was to be born into poverty. His father, Dondinho, had played for Fluminense. But back then football in Brazil was a game that made its administrators and owners rich, not its players.
From the age of four, young Edson was obliged to shine shoes to supplement the meagre household income. What there was, though, was football. Schooled by his father on the streets, this was his point of escape. He loved the game, his favourite player the Vasco da Gama goalkeeper Bile.
His mispronunciation of his hero’s name gave birth to his own nickname. And never mind the 10,000 hours of childhood practice generally considered necessary in the development of genius, virtually every waking second of Pele’s first 15 years was spent kicking and heading, passing and dribbling, much of it playing a new form of indoor football called futsal, generally with adults.
When his father took him to see a contact at Santos FC, a club in the nearby Sao Paulo barrio of Vila Belmiro, they recognised he was something special. They put him in the first team at 15 (he scored on his debut, naturally) and he was made a full Brazil international a year later. He was just 16 years nine months old. And, of course, he netted the only Brazil goal in a 2-1 defeat by Argentina. Sixty-five years on, he remains the youngest scorer in the history of the Brazilian national team.
But it was when he turned up in Sweden for the 1958 World Cup that the wider world was obliged first to take note of the new phenomenon. After the trauma of losing the final on home soil eight years earlier, this was a Brazil side burdened with national expectation. But Pele showed no hint of having history on his shoulders. He just played like he was on the streets of Bauru: athletic, quick, lithe, endlessly skilful and in possession of the most acute footballing intelligence.
The tournament became almost a personal procession: after making his World Cup debut in Brazil’s third group game, he scored the winner in the quarter-final against Wales, a hat-trick in the semi-final victory against France and another two in the final against Sweden.
The world recognised quickly what it was watching. And Europe’s leading clubs – Real Madrid, Juventus, Inter Milan and Manchester United among them – all made overtures to sign him up. But in an era long before footballers became one of Brazil’s principal exports, the Brazilian government and football authorities were not letting any of their best players head abroad. The entire 1958 squad were based in Brazil in a league reckoned then to be the toughest in the world.
When considering who might be reckoned the best of all time, we invent all sorts of conditions. Messi was, until his glorious triumph in Qatar, considered not to be a candidate because he had never won the World Cup. And for some the idea has long held force that Pele cannot be reckoned the best because he never played in Europe. It is an argument easily dismissed by casting an eye over the statistics. The fact was, when every Brazilian was obliged to play in it, the nation’s domestic system in Pele’s time was beyond robust.
The stats are also in his favour. The average goals per game in the Brazilian league between 1961 and 1965 was 3.07; in the same period, the average goals per game in the European Cup was 3.8. Yet, while it was harder to score in Brazil than in Europe’s senior competition, in 1958, when Santos won the Sao Paulo state title, Pele scored an eye-watering 58 goals.
Propelled by his extraordinary returns, the club won their first national title in 1961, and retained it for the next four seasons. They won two Copa Libertadores and then faced the winners of the European Cup in the Intercontinental Cup.
In 1962, Pele scored twice in a 3-2 win over Benfica at the Maracana, before delivering a masterly hat-trick in the 5-2 away victory in Lisbon. He scored twice, too, at San Siro in 1968 when Santos lost to Milan before overcoming the Italians in Brazil to lift the trophy again. These were the kind of performances which suggest the idea that he could not have cut it in Europe is fanciful.
That he did not win more medals was largely the result of the decision of the Santos board not to enter the Libertadores in 1966, 1967 and 1969, preferring to go on extensive world tours in their close season.
Like a footballing Harlem Globetrotters, they would head off for lucrative friendlies to wherever they were best paid. Including a trip to Lagos during the Nigerian civil war. Pele later claimed in his autobiography that the team’s presence there stopped the war, encouraging a temporary ceasefire. It did not, hostilities carried on regardless. Perhaps it is more indicative of his box-office pull that thousands turned up to watch the then most famous footballer in the world in the midst of domestic turmoil.
On those tours, Santos were shameless in exploiting their main attraction. Pele was invariably called upon to play four, sometimes five times a week, against everyone from Inter Milan and Real Madrid to West Ham and, bizarrely, Plymouth Argyle. That is why of his 1,283 goals, 526 came in friendlies; he played in hundreds of them. And it was on those tours that European defences tried to stop him by force. He was filmed being kicked, punched and stamped on across the continent.
It was a tactic that was first honed in the 1962 World Cup, when he was bullied out of contention in Brazil’s second group game. But it reached its apotheosis in 1966. The image of him being helped from the Goodison Park pitch by Brazil’s trainers after being assaulted by Bulgaria’s defenders remains a stain on the game.
But never mind his rewards making such pain worthwhile, his cut of the spoils on all those international trips was derisory. And he fell out with the national team in 1968, refusing to play for them again when he discovered that Joao Havelange, the president of the Brazilian Federation and later head of Fifa, had sold the marketing rights to his image without his consent.
Still he played on for his club. He was not going to walk away from the game that always made him smile. And still the Brazilian nation loved him for his brilliance. When he scored his 1,000th career goal, playing for Santos at the Maracana in 1969, the entire country ground to a halt. Footage of him slotting home the penalty that brought up his mark, then repeatedly kissing the ball before being mobbed by team-mates, opponents and fans alike was played out repeatedly.
The dispute with Havelange was resolved in time for him to be picked for Mexico in 1970. And there, with colour television now internationally available, he found the world watching. In his dazzling yellow shirt, his skill, his athleticism, his intelligence, his bravery were intoxicating.
More than that, everything he did was infused with dignity, with charm, with grace. He thanked referees for their diligence, applauded goalkeepers who made saves from him, and congratulated defenders who tackled him. This was no growling bad boy. This was the perfect footballing gentleman, a sporting hero for the world. And one whose longevity was extraordinary: 12 years on from taking the world by storm, he was still doing it.
Returning to Brazil with the Jules Rimet trophy, he assumed there might, finally, be appropriate financial reward. But none was forthcoming. So disillusioned was he that he retired from the national team in 1971. Appreciating his presence was one of enormous national value, the military government tried to coerce him to play in the 1974 finals, threatening to blackmail him by making public details of his tax. He outflanked them by announcing his retirement from the game.
And then in 1975 he finally hit pay dirt. He was signed by New York Cosmos to play in the newly fledged North American Soccer League. He was to be paid $7million, making him the highest-earning athlete in the world. Even that opportunity, however, nearly came to an end almost before it had begun. He was due to play his first game for the club before they had found a suitable home pitch. A local park was hired and fearing what the world’s media would make of a mudbath, the Cosmos owner had the surface painted green.
When the game was over and Pele took off his boots in the changing room, he panicked when he saw his feet had turned green, convinced he had undergone some sort of allergic reaction to US grass. But he was persuaded not to return to Sao Paulo on the first plane available. And for the next two years, alongside Franz Beckenbauer, Cruyff and George Best, he served as ambassador for the game’s emergence in its new market, winning hearts and minds wherever he went, a natural diplomat and salesman. Plus he kept scoring: 37 goals in 64 appearances for Cosmos.
When he finally retired in 1977, his smile, his charm, his relentless upbeat good cheer became ubiquitous as he endorsed everything from Viagra to Unicef, finally finding proper financial return for the pleasure he had brought so many. And wherever he went people would remind him of his goals, his headers, his dribbles, his dummies. Plus his passes, those works of art that elevated an entire game. Right until his death he remained in his homeland universally known by the nickname O Rei. It is hard to argue against that moniker. He really was football’s king.
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