My meeting with football’s greatest player came 41 years ago inside, of all places, the wood-panelled charms of Highbury Stadium, a ground where I had been going for the best part of two decades as an Arsenal supporter. I had just returned from a lengthy trip to his homeland, Brazil, where I had conducted interviews and research before the 1982 World Cup finals to be held in Spain.
Arsenal were to have their first sponsored match the next day, and Pelé, along with the world snooker champion Steve Davis, had been paid by Ingersoll Electronics to help publicise its involvement in the burgeoning computer games market, notably its Atari brand’s Space Invaders and something called Championship Soccer.
Smartly dressed, handsome and not looking his 40 years, Pelé had been lured on to Highbury’s very worn pitch to have his picture taken with some of the Arsenal players still hanging around the ground after training, themselves hoping to rub shoulders with the great man. They did more than that. Paul Davis, John Devine, Brian McDermott, David O’Leary, Graham Rix, Kenny Sansom and Brian Talbot, established internationals and young pretenders, hoisted the superstar off his feet.
While that was happening I was asking the PR representative when I could have some words with Pelé. “He isn’t going to give any interviews,” she announced. Even that early in a career I hoped would continue longer than the two years it had lasted up to then, I knew these chances did not come along every day. So I bided my time.
After he had returned from the pitch I pounced, but unsure whether it was Pelé’s suggestion not to give interviews or the company’s, I formulated my plan: I would say hello in the language of his birth and then, knowing my Portuguese was not good enough to hold a long conversation, segue into English and drop the name of Sócrates, the captain who would lead the Brazil team into the 1982 World Cup who I had just interviewed at his club Corinthians in São Paulo. Then, as now, the captain of the national team remains the most revered person in that large and diverse country.
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It worked. After my initial “oi, tudo bem?” Pelé, who as I wrote at the time had been tucking into his “hot sausage and sandwich” from the buffet, was charm itself at the mention of Sócrates. “How is he?” he said, thankfully in English.
We spoke about Brazil’s problems in attack, where they lacked a striker who could consistently score goals, something that would haunt them at the World Cup, where again the responsibility was heaped on the shoulders of Zico, probably the world’s best No 10 at the time, and Sócrates, “O Doutor”, the languid medical student who directed things from the middle of the park.
I asked how he rated the chances of England, who were under the management of the experienced, safe hands of Ron Greenwood. He was not sure that they would qualify, which they did after missing the previous two finals, but only thanks to a Paul Mariner goal in their last qualifying game against Hungary.
Along the way they had lost to Switzerland, Romania and, most famously, Mrs Thatcher’s boys “took a beating” in Norway. “I was not impressed with England against Romania,” Pelé said with understatement, although he had good words for the midfielder Bryan Robson, the winger Steve Coppell and Russell Osman, the Ipswich Town defender who did not make the World Cup squad.
At the end of our ten-minute chat, I did break my very short-lived vow not to ask for autographs, getting him to sign one of the programmes from the next day’s match. Later, he took to the field waving to a crowd of 57,472 that sang to the Arsenal manager, Terry Neill, “sign him up, sign him up, sign him up” before their game with Aston Villa, which confirmed the West Midlands club’s First Division title despite a 2-0 defeat.
