In the days after Pelé’s death, someone recalled something Andy Warhol once said of football’s most loved icon: “Pelé is one of the few who contradicted my theory. Instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.” With Brazil, he won the World Cup three times. With his club Santos, he won ten league titles. At every team he played for, he was the star, and he endured.
At one time we wondered who was the greatest, Pelé or Diego Maradona? More recently we have pondered about Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi. Pelé’s death at 82, from colon cancer, leads us back to those old questions. How could he have done more for his country than Maradona did for Argentina at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico? The truth is, he did.
Before the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, Brazil’s football team did not have the identity or the reputation they now enjoy. The country had never won the World Cup and when the team turned up in Sweden with the 17-year-old striker Edson Arantes do Nascimento in their squad, hardly anyone noticed. “I was so skinny, quite a few people thought I was the mascot,” Pelé would later say.
Cliff Jones was part of the Wales team that played Brazil in the 1958 quarter-final and admitted that no one in their squad knew anything about Pelé. Now, go search for the moment in the second half of that quarter-final, with the game still scoreless, that the ball comes to the teenager. He’s got his back to the goal, with the Wales centre half Mel Charles standing directly behind him.
Mel was the younger brother of the great John Charles and also a highly accomplished player. Pelé would later say Mel was the best centre half at that 1958 World Cup. That day at Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg, Mel was 23, Pelé only 17. As the ball comes to Pelé, he controls it with his chest, guiding it onto his right foot while turning his body to the left to create the space to flick the ball past Charles.
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Poor Mel stands with his arms spread, as if to say, “Thou shalt not pass,” but the teenager has gone. The ball bounced once before Pelé stroked it past Jack Kelsey in the goal. Freeze the action right there and take stock of the disbelief. Wales’s right back, Stuart Williams, stands with the palms of his hands pressed to his temples, hoping to stop his brain exploding.
Charles is now facing his own goal, his arms fully extended, pleading for someone to explain what just happened. His captain, David Bowen, stands inside the penalty area, his arms resting on his thighs, his head bent low, as if about to be sick. This is what one moment of brilliance from a 17-year-old did to a Wales team that knew how to defend.
That got Brazil to the World Cup semi-finals, where that same 17-year-old scored three times in the 5-2 victory over France and then another two in the final against Sweden. Ten minutes into the second half, with Brazil leading 2-1, Pelé scored perhaps the greatest World Cup final goal of all. The cross came to him high, about 15 yards from the goal. Alongside him, Sweden’s Sigge Parling stood. Parling was bigger and stronger, but Pelé jumped so high, and so early, he was able to take the ball on his chest. In the air, he chested the ball down into his path and instinctively thought to shoot for goal. But a second Sweden defender, Bengt Gustavsson, anticipated this and closed the space in front of Pelé. With any other player, the attack would have ended there.
Pelé then lifted the ball over Gustavsson, nimbly moved round him, waited for the ball to drop and then struck the surest volley into the goal. Could Maradona or Ronaldo or even Messi have done this at 17? Injured for the first two games, he made four starts in that tournament and scored six goals. Football would never again not know Pelé, and, in large part because of how he played, the game would see Brazil in new, brilliant light. After his team’s 5-2 loss in the semi-final, the France goalkeeper Claude Abbes said: “I would rather play against ten Germans than one Brazilian.”
And that was only the beginning of Pelé’s extraordinary career of 1,283 goals in 1,367 games as a professional footballer. He was reaching the end of his international career when part of the best international team the game has seen: the Brazil team at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.
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Then, he was surrounded by players of the highest quality: Carlos Alberto, Clodoaldo, Gérson, Tostão, Rivellino, Jairzinho. And still, he was the shining light. Still the individual capable of brilliance but also the consummate team player, who picked the right pass and delivered it with perfect timing. His goal in the 4-1 victory over Italy in the final came from a bullet-like header after he had jumped early and then hung miraculously in the air.
Many have recalled this week that his life off the pitch wasn’t without its troubles. Three marriages, two daughters born out of wedlock, one of which he initially refused to acknowledge, a son convicted of drug trafficking, businesses that failed and the feeling among some Brazilians that he didn’t do enough to combat racism in his own country.
In his autobiography he tried to explain how he dealt with the criticism and what he saw as the lack of understanding: “One of the ways I try to keep perspective on things is to remind myself that what people are responding to isn’t me, necessarily; it’s this mythical figure that Pelé has become.”
There was much truth in that. Edson Arantes do Nascimento was born not to be an activist, nor a perfect role model, but a footballer. To that he gave every ounce of his being and became the greatest there has ever been.
