Stretching for four blocks, snaking through the heat of the midday sun, they had come in football shirts and board shorts, in tank tops and flip-flops, in grief and in gratitude, to pay their respects to an icon.
Pelé lay at rest in the centre of the pitch he once graced, in the city that conspired in his rise from barefoot boy to supreme being of the global game: a life, defined by the fluid grace with which he moved through it, having come to a final, stately stop.
• Pelé’s funeral: Brazil says a final farewell to its football hero
Brazil’s biggest star died aged 82 on Thursday at the Albert Einstein hospital in São Paulo. He had been brought to Santos, 20 miles south, to the Vila Belmiro stadium of Santos FC, where he spent most of his career. It was an ending that made sense. Pelé lived one of those grand sporting lives that makes people want to bear witness, just to be able to say they laid eyes on him.
And so thousands had come, men and women, children and pensioners, locals and visitors, those who watched him play and those who never did, for one last chance to see him in the flesh.
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“It’s important to me to see him for the first time, because I never met him before, so I believe that I am meeting him today,” a man called Flávio told me. He had driven for an hour from São Paulo, with his wife and her father. “I followed his career through TV, through movies, my father-in-law told me stories about him. We grow up in Brazil seeing Pelé as a big symbol in our lives, and in our style of life.”
Antonio de Paz, 67, was one of the first in the line, having queued overnight. He wore a T-shirt bearing Pelé’s face and a gold tinfoil crown, and carried a replica World Cup trophy. He recalled first watching Pelé play in 1969. His friend Marco remembered getting his autograph.
Others were much younger. A teenager from Santos called Renzo had come with his friends. “We are here because Pelé is the king of football,” he said. “We are Santos fans, so it’s very important for us to celebrate his life.”
Pelé (obituary, December 29, 2022) had arrived the previous evening, his hearse trailed by police outriders and greeted by fireworks. He lay under a simple white canopy, in an open casket, wearing a blue shirt and covered in a white froth of flowers and lace, surrounded by soldiers in magnificent regalia: plumed helmets, shiny epaulets, brass buttons and white belts.
In one corner of the stands, wreaths sat like fat fondant cakes.
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Neymar had sent one such tribute, Vinícius Junior another. Reporters stood in dark suits dabbing themselves with white handkerchiefs; photographers’ telephoto lenses extended from theirs faces like giant proboscises.
Gianni Infantino, the Fifa president, arrived in a black tie and was whisked through a VIP lane. “We’re going to ask every country in the world to name one of their football stadiums with the name of Pelé,” he said.
From certain angles, this occasion had the sombre palette of a funeral. The colours of Santos are black and white, the stadium painted in that simple scheme. The stands had been bedecked with giant banners in black and white, saying Viva O Rei (Long Live the King) and O Unico A Parar Uma Guerra (The Only One to Stop a War), a reference to a Santos exhibition match in Nigeria in 1967 that caused two warring factions to agree a ceasefire).
Shirts with Pelé’s name and number, 10, had been tied to railings in the stands, where they fluttered in the breeze like monochrome bunting. A pitch that Pelé decorated with zigzags had been sectioned by metal barriers into orderly horizontals. But when the first mourners came through at 10am, they came in a flood of colour: the fluorescent yellows and lime greens of the Brazil shirts, the lush neons of a beachfront town. It felt fitting, for it is Pelé’s legacy that he transported this sport from its pre-modern, black-and-white era to glorious, opulent Technicolor, culminating in that radiant summer of 1970, where it seemed he and his team had twiddled the dial that drenched the watching world in the dazzling illumination of that first colour tournament.
And this wake did not feel at all funereal. I didn’t see a single person cry or even look sad. Many were snapping selfies or making videos, their phones thrust out in front of them. One man filed past toting an infant. A father carried his son, wearing a yellow Brazil shirt, on his shoulders. In the queue, cold beers and ice creams were slurped.
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The most striking thing about those who had made the pilgrimage was how young many of them were, how many of those present knew Pelé only from archive footage and passed-down memories, but who still held him in their mind as a vivid and beloved figure.
“It’s like Shakespeare,” said Liam Grazer, one of a group of Britons who had interrupted their holiday to join the queue. “There are certain [people] who deliver so much, are so high-quality or so significant, that they transcend generations. All the clips that you see of him, the skill, the finesse, all the beautiful aspects of the game.”
It was a strange and unforgettable day, the air thick with history and humidity. On Sunday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in as president, scenes of his inauguration jostling with clips of Pelé’s prime on TVs in bars and homes. A new dawn and a sunset all at once.
Politicians and footballers both tell countries stories about themselves, a vision of what they could be at their best. It is the nature of politics that the images conjured by a new president almost always sour and fade. The memory of Pelé’s glory days, the beauty of his movement, the simple uplift of his story, will remain indelible.
