Pelé dies, the only footballer who won 3 World Cups (and who only needed to “play on the Moon”)

“Sometimes I joke that I only needed to go to the Moon, I needed to play on the Moon,” he said in a message to remember the 50th anniversary of the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, the last one he played and won the 10th jersey. Brazil.

Although he never went to the Moon, the man born in 1940 in the Brazilian town of Três Corações, in the state of Minas Gerais, seemed to play soccer without respecting the laws of gravity.

With the same right and left legs with which he indistinctly took powerful shots on goal, he could give subtle touches to the ball, passing it over the heads of his markers.

His 1959 “goal with the four hats” for Brazilian club Santos, where he spent most of his career, is considered one of the most beautiful he scored, skipping four opponents at just 19 years old.

Just as he could advance with speed with the ball glued to his feet, dribbling, he took off the ground with amazing jumps to head into the rival area, as he did in the 1970 final, scoring the first goal against Italy for a Brazil full of other cone stars Jairzinho and Rivelino.

However, Pelé used to say that his father, João Ramos do Nascimento, had a record he never achieved of five headed goals in one game, before a knee injury exacerbated his family’s financial difficulties.

Pelé went from playing as a child with balls made of socks in the town of Baurú, to making his debut for Santos at the age of 15. He scored a goal in that first game and later also achieved glory with that club that he represented until 1974: two Libertadores Cups, two Intercontinental Cups, five Brazil Cups, a dozen São Paulo championships…

That he was able to play so many years in Santos without being transferred to Europe was largely because the Brazilian government declared him a national treasure and the club itself organized exhibition matches in different countries.

A year after announcing his retirement, in 1975 he went to New York Cosmos with a million-dollar contract and helped promote soccer in the United States. His last game was a friendly between that club and Santos, in October 1977.

Throughout his career, Pelé scored 1,283 goals, 767 of them in official matches according to the RSSSF, which compiles soccer statistics. He had an average of 0.9 goals per game, something extraordinary until today.

In addition to his physical skills and technical quality, Pelé stood out for his field vision and ability to anticipate his rivals’ actions.

It is true that the football of those years was very different from the current one. It was played at a slower pace, with less intensity and more room for creators like Pelé.

But in those days, professional soccer players faced peculiar challenges.

The playing fields were more irregular, the physical preparation was less developed and the defenses more rude: sometimes they jumped directly to “take” their most skilled rivals out of the game, as they did with Pelé in the 1966 World Cup in England, the only that O Rei played without winning.

Instead, he won the cups in ’58, ’62 and ’70, more than fulfilling the promise of winning a World Cup that he said he had made to his father as a child, when he saw him cry for the first time over the radio over the defeat of Brazil. against Uruguay in the 1950 final at the Maracana stadium.

From his hand, Brazil shook off complexes and was a world soccer superpower.

With the passing of an athlete as sensational as Pelé, it is natural for fans to wonder if he has been the best of all time: it is a way of also questioning, with a certain nostalgia, if we will see another like him again.

The same thing happens in other disciplines, with more or less discussion: was Mohamed Ali the best boxer of all time? Will there be another basketball player comparable to Michael Jordan?

In the case of Pelé, a common comparison is with Diego Maradona. When FIFA decided to choose the best soccer player of the 20th century in 2000, the Argentine won an internet vote but the Brazilian was chosen by a jury of experts. Finally, the distinction was for both.

That list did not include 21st century phenomena such as the Argentine Lionel Messi or the Portuguese Cristiano Ronaldo, who have alternated the men’s Ballon d’Or for best footballer of the year and have showcases full of titles. Messi also won the first World Cup with his team in 2022 and with that he added arguments to be considered in the discussion about the best in history.

Pelé was also named “Athlete of the Century” by the International Olympic Committee in 1999, even though he never competed in the games because professional footballers were prevented from doing so.

As a player he acquired such international renown that during an African tour of Santos in 1969 there was a ceasefire in the Nigerian civil war so that he could play a match for Santos, as reported but without material evidence.

His fame only grew after the ’70 World Cup, the first World Cup broadcast in color on television.

Pelé was less controversial than Maradona, although his critics inside Brazil blamed him for faults in the public sphere and in his private life, especially after he retired from soccer but remained active in the businesses associated with the sport.

His figure was stamped on millions of MasterCard credit cards around the world, he signed contracts with multinationals such as Coca-Cola and he even advertised Viagra (although he clarified that he did not need to take it).

Promoting brands is something any athlete does these days, but in Pelé’s case it came as criticism of his relationship with the dark power of soccer was being raised.

The former Brazilian soccer player Socrates He branded him a traitor in 2001 because he had embraced the then president of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF), Ricardo Teixeiraafter accusing him of corruption.

Juca Kfouri, a sports journalist who had a close relationship with Pelé —to the point that he said he was the one who recommended him to former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso to be his Sports Minister in the 1990s— linked the controversies with the “little training ” that the ex-soccer player had to position himself on issues of national life.

But also with Pelé’s remembered refusal to recognize one of his daughters until he lost a long legal battle and his paternity was proven in a DNA test.

According to Kfouri, that was a badly told story, since Pelé “was a victim of blackmail” from people who surrounded the daughter, but the stigma remained and worsened after she died of cancer in 2006, after starting a political career. .

The journalist reported that Pelé was “charming” and “exemplary humble” in personal treatment, but he himself acknowledged that his public image was divided between his popular nickname Pelé and his name Edson.

“Edson is a common man with flaws and virtues like any other, Pelé is a separate entity, the greatest athlete of the 20th century,” Kfouri told BBC Mundo.

“And that ambiguity remained.”

Although Pelé even dabbled in film and music, he will always be remembered primarily for his huge successes inside stadiums.

Maybe it was the South African leader Nelson Mandela Who best summed up what Pelé represented on the pitch: “Watching him play was watching the delight of a child combined with the extraordinary grace of a man in his entirety.”

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