With the whole world worrying about whether or not there will be Christmas, and with much of Mediterranean Europe under curfew while northern “Calvinists” continue to enjoy their freedoms, this is a holiday story. Of saints (capitalized), from birthday (the celebrant has just turned eighty) and kings (with a small letter). Well of one king Edson
Arantes
do
Birth, King .
Much has been speculated on whether Maradona The Messi are better, a comparison that Pele himself has described as absurd, an offense because of its mere formulation (“How can a guy who shoots well and hard with both legs and shoots well in the head with someone who doesn’t he and only shoots with the left? ”). Not to mention his three World Cups, his two Liberators and his more than a thousand goals, although many were in the friendlies of Santos’ tours of Europe to earn money (two against Barça in a 1-5 in the Camp Nou, three to Atlético in a 3-5, four to Eintracht Frankfurt in a 2-5, eight to Inter in seven games, six to Roma, ten to Benfica …). After all, despite its successes in the sixties, it was a poor club.
The Santos of the 60s played most of the away games because their stadium was very small
The biggest reason to avoid comparisons, or if you fall into the temptation to choose them on the side of Pelé, is that the Brazilian was a king in black and white while his Argentine rivals have been (or are) in color. Pelé is from early television, and half of his goals were never filmed. It did not make transatlantic flights in first class but in tourist, and the movements within the country were by bus. It is true that today’s players are fitter, faster and stronger, they don’t drink or smoke, they watch their diet and have gurus and psychologists at their disposal, and that matches are played at a much faster pace. But also that they enjoy arbitration protection that already would have liked to King , that any medium hard tackle is a yellow or red card, and opponents do not spit in their faces. And that the cameras, filming from several dozen angles and repetitions in slow motion, magnify the good plays and make the virtues sublime.
You can talk about Messi’s exploits under Pep, and what Maradona did with Argentina and Napoli, but no player in history has had two seasons like the ones Pelé enjoyed in 1962 and 63. In twenty-four incredible months he won ten of the eleven tournaments that he played with Santos and the national team (a World Cup, a pair of Libertadores and Intercontinentals, two Brazilian cups, a São Paulo championship and another in Rio-Sãu Paulo, scoring 106 goals in 79 games and scoring in twenty of them consecutive).
Of the 1,116 matches he played in Santos’ white clothing, less than a fifth (210) were properly at home, in the small Vila Belmiro stadium, which bears the name of the neighborhood of the coastal town of Santos (eighty kilometers de São Paulo) where it is located, in a residential area, surrounded by houses. Its low capacity (16,000 spectators today) meant that the important matches were played on larger fields, such as that of the richest and most powerful local rivals (the verdes of Palmeiras, linked to the community of Italian origin, the tricolor from São Paulo, the most awarded, and Corinthians, from the working-class suburbs, the most popular).
With five million followers (one sixth of Flamingo’s), Santos’ impact on world football is disproportionate to his economic might, given the way he dominated the sport in the 1960s. Fish , as it is called by the location of the city by the sea, was the football equivalent of the Harlem Globetrotters, reaching a truce in 1969 in the war between Nigeria and Biafra, and that the military authorities opened bridges and roads that they were closed so that an eagerly awaited friendly could be played.
Edson Arantes do Nascimento celebrated his eightieth birthday last Friday surrounded by friends and family in his beach mansion in Guaruja, where he has been since the beginning of the pandemic (he has two other houses in Santos and São Paulo), with his mobility reduced by one Hip operation that went wrong (he goes on crutches or in a wheelchair), keeping a wise distance from the convulsive Brazilian politics, and without openly supporting Bolsonaro like Rivaldo, Ronaldinho, Kaká, Lucas Moura or Gabriel Jesús. Of course, insisting that there is only one king (or president), and his name is Pelé.
