BarcelonaPelé, considered the best football player by millions of people, has died in São Paulo at the age of 82 after months of fighting cancer. Three-time world champion, Pelé symbolizes the best era of Brazilian football, a country where he is quite the hero. His ability to turn a mundane activity, scoring goals, into a kind of art gave him a fame that would lead to him being invited to play matches on five continents. Great star of Santos, the club where he is revered, he would end his career playing for the New York Cosmos in the United States, where he would be quite a star in the 70s. In 1981 he participated in the John Huston film Evasion or victory alongside actors like Michael Caine or Max Von Sydow and brought his magic to other generations. Ambassador of the United Nations and face of a thousand advertising campaigns, Pelé was immortalized by Andy Warhol and was received by dozens of heads of state. Few understood football like him. And few understood the power of the new sports-related business before.
Born in 1940 in Três Corações, Pelé did not want to be Pelé. He wanted to be known as Edson, the name his parents had given him after the inventor Thomas Edison. But at school his classmates laughed at him when he didn’t pronounce the name of Bilé, Vasco da Gama’s goalkeeper, correctly. Because instead of Bilé he said something similar to Pelé, behind the scenes they started calling him that. Then they called him Pelé to his face, which caused him to lose his papers. He went so far as to make some jokes in order to try to avoid being Pelé. It sounded like a stupid and childish name to him, when he had an inventor’s name, even though the register had written Edson instead of Edison. So he became Pelé. Now no one can say that the name sounds childish, quite the opposite. In a republic like Brazil, if a name is related to a reign, this is his. He always will be King. The best Brazilian footballer in history. And, according to the Brazilians, the best in the world. In Argentina they don’t see it the same way.
Whether he is the best or not, Pelé knew how to turn the game into a business. He knew how to turn sport into a show. And he knew how to do it properly. Nobody played like him, nobody competed like him. Pelé understood earlier than many other sportsmen that football became a business and, if he wanted to succeed, he had to put on the best show. He always did, dominating the stage on and off the pitch. When the world discovered Pelé at the 1958 World Cup, no one could have expected that, a few years later, the children of half the planet would want to wear yellow. Brazil was still a great unknown, then. But in the 60s all of Europe learned Portuguese words thanks to Brazilian music and football. In the Beautiful game, samba or bossa nova. The best ambassadors of that Brazil that dreamed of being great and free, but ended up becoming a dictatorship. If the musicians went into exile, Pelé did not. He knew how to succeed with all kinds of governments. It will always be a stain on his career, never having used the speaker he had to fight against racism or military regimes.
The peers eren João Ramos do Nascimento dondinho and María Celeste Arantes. Dondinho was a player for Atlético Mineiro, but his sporting career was cut short when, in his first match with Mineiro, he hit his knee and tore the ligaments. Thanks to his father, Pelé grew up loving football, although at first his mother was hesitant to give him permission to go to São Paulo to play for Santos, who had discovered him. When he arrived at Santos, he entered the lower categories, and made his First Division debut at the age of 16 in a friendly. Then he already scored a goal, and ended his first full season with a total of 38 games and 41 goals. In the second, in a tournament between the best teams in the country and some Europeans in Rio de Janeiro, he dazzled everyone, and won the right to debut with the Brazilian national team at 17 years old. Initially, he was a substitute at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, but once he entered the starting team he never left, becoming the youngest player ever to score in a World Cup. Brazil would become world champion for the first time thanks to two youngsters: Pelé and Garrincha. In the final against the Swedes, aged 18, he invented a magnificent goal by hat-tricking a defender. The world had just discovered a special footballer.
Winning the World Cup was his springboard to fame. When he turned 18, Pelé had to do military service as a conscript, a short break before continuing to score goals of all kinds with Santos. In 1959, he was able to score 58 goals in 38 official games for Santos. With the club fish he chained titles in Brazil and also internationally, winning twice in form the Copa Libertadores, the equivalent of the Champions League at the time in South America, first against Peñarol and then against Boca Juniors. It was a time when football was very violent. In the match at La Bombonera against Boca Juniors, Pelé received bravely. But he provided an assist and scored a goal. “He was very technical, but also very strong. If he won, he would return” the Argentinian Rattin would remember. In fact, Pelé’s fame caused Santos to get sick of making money to tour halfway around the world. And sometimes, the matches could end in fistfights.
In the 1962 World Cup, Pelé could not help much because he was injured, but the Brazilians revalidated the title. His fame caused rival defenses to look for him to hurt him, as would happen in England’s 1966 World Cup, where Brazil would fall victim to the hard play of the rivals in the first phase of the tournament. After the England episodes, Pelé resigned from the Brazilian team. However, with Santos a new era of success began and he toured half the world, especially in Africa, where he was a hero, as he liked to see that the best player in the world was black. And, in 1969, Pelé would reach the figure of 1,000 official goals.
In 1968 he considered returning to the Brazilian national team, but did not do so until 1969. Pelé would take the pain out of England’s World Cup at the 1970 match in Mexico, when, in the midst of a military dictatorship, Brazil sent to Mexico what is considered by many to be the best football team in history, with five different players in attack who wore number 10 for their club. Brazil would win their third World Cup after defeating the Italians in the final by 4-1. And Pelé ended up being walked like a hero on the lawn of the Azteca stadium by the Mexican fans. Tired of playing so many matches around the world, he began to prepare the way to say goodbye to professional football, starting with the national team. On July 18, 1971, he played his last game in the yellow shirt against Yugoslavia. And in 1972 he would leave Santos to accept the offer of the New York Cosmos, where he lived for a few years as a great media star. On October 1, 1977, at the age of 36, Pelé finally said goodbye to football in front of 75,000 spectators in a match between Santos and Cosmos, playing for a time for each team. Thus, the end of the career of one of the best sportsmen in history, with 1,367 games played and 1,283 goals.
Six years after the death of Johan Cruyff and two years after Diego Armando Maradona was fired, football mourns the death of another of its kings.
