Ask an American any team that won the last Champions League, who is the current Ballon d’Or or even what offside is, and chances are you will get no answer in the country where football is a sport that is played with hands. But say you come from Brazil. There is a great chance of hearing back an “I love Pelé”.
The king of soccer, who died this Thursday (29) at the age of 82, played for only two teams in his life, Santos and New York Cosmos. Even during his brief spell at the American club, from 1975 to 1977, when he was about to retire, he permanently marked the American imagination.
“He achieved such global superstar status that even in countries where football is not the most important sport, people recognized him as a very special athlete,” says American historian Brenda Elsey, author of a series of books on football.
Pelé was hired by the New York club, which at the time was in the hands of Warner, in 1975 as the highest paid athlete in the country, after intense mobilization that even involved the then US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.
The sport was so unknown to Americans that a memo filed in the records of the CIA, the US intelligence agency, with details of a player’s visit to the White House then under Gerald Ford, explained what such football was: “A great game both to play and to watch. It doesn’t require a lot of space or equipment to play. It’s easy to learn and, as the objective is not to hide the ball, as in our football [americano], it’s simple for the viewer to follow along. It also doesn’t have all those breaks.”
The document also teaches how to pronounce the player’s name (“PEH-LAY”, according to the text) and the word football in Brazilian Portuguese (“fu chi bal”).
“He was very important in putting the sport on the map and inspired a whole generation of Americans. Even though the league didn’t last long, he inspired a lot of people and helped build the sport in this country”, says American journalist Ives Galarcep. “I’ve been covering sports for 25 years and most of the people I know who were important for the sport here started watching Pelé.”
In the USA he became a star, muse of Andy Warhol and friend of Muhammad Ali, in stories already known. What’s hard to know is the impact on the hundreds of thousands of people who saw him play in the American League. “Imagine 78,000 people filling a football stadium on Long Island or Boston in the 1970s, it’s incredible,” says Elsey.
“People write to me to this day to say that they saw Pelé play when they were kids and that they will never forget it”, says the researcher, who organized the honorary doctorate that Pelé received from Hofstra University, in New York, in 2014.
Despite Pelé’s success, Cosmos did not succeed and closed its doors in 1985, along with the end of the professional league it played in, the NASL (North American Football League). Even having gathered a constellation like Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia and Carlos Alberto Torres, in addition to the King himself, the club went bankrupt and only returned in the 2010s, but, without relevance, it paused at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and did not return more to the fields.
For Galarcep, the league ended “because they put a lot of money in without thinking about how to make it last as a business”, he says. “They put tons of money into bringing all these players in, but they didn’t take root. The most important part of professional sport is that you have to develop players with talent to play in your league. It’s no use buying all the players you want, because at some point it’s going to be hard to keep them,” he says.
It is something that, according to him, the current professional league, MLS (Major League Soccer), founded in 1993, knew how to do and is beginning to bear fruit. “The sport is growing now, and Pelé was a seed of that.”
