PELE: WHY WE SHOULD VALUE HIM MORE HIGHLY
If you compare prodigious geniuses across history, Edson Arantes do Nascimento is right up there with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. True, Pele didn’t write his first symphony when he was eight but at 16 he scored 58 goals for Santos in Sao Paulo’s top flight, a record that still stands. At 17, he won the 1958 World Cup with Brazil, scoring six goals, including two in a 5-2 victory over hosts Sweden in the final. Legendary French striker Just Fontaine, who struck 13 goals in that tournament, remarked: “When I saw Pele play, I just wanted to hang up my boots.” And, at 20, ‘O Rei’ – ‘the king’ as he became known – recorded this astonishing goalscoring sequence: 5, 4, 5, 1, 4, 4. Twenty-three strikes in six league matches is a feat even Manchester City’s Norwegian goal machine Erling Haaland is (yet) to match.
Determined not to peak too soon, Pele won two more World Cups – in 1962 and 1970, the latter as the conductor of a glorious side dubbed ‘the beautiful team’ – reintroduced soccer to America (with the New York Cosmos) and, along the way, became sport’s first black global superstar, just ahead of Muhammad Ali.
In the unresolveable argument about football’s GOAT, Lionel Messi’s supporters maintain that the game was very different in Pele’s heyday. Tactics were cruder, teams less defensive and matches much slower. All true, up to a point. And yet Sandro Mazzola, Italy’s superb attacking midfielder who played in the 1970 final, insisted that Messi, while undoubtedly a genius, had the immense good fortune to play in teams built around him, on pitches as smooth as snooker table baize and protected by rule changes that deterred defenders from tackling him.
If that sounds like the football equivalent of Monty Python’s nostalgic, myopic ‘Four Yorkshireman’, watch the 1966 World Cup game in which Portugal knocked out Brazil. In less than a minute, right-back Joao Morais twice clattered Pele so badly he should have been sent off for either challenge. Referee George McCabe didn’t even give a free-kick.
There was nothing Brazil’s No10 could not do with the ball. He could score with either foot, or head, and dribble past defenders at will. At the Maracana in 1961, he ran almost the entire length of the pitch, beating seven opponents before scoring for Santos in a 3-1 victory against Fluminense.
Unlike Messi, known to shout at strikers who shoot rather than pass to him, Pele took pride in an assist. Against England in 1970, he drew the entire defence towards him before passing to Jairzinho to score. In the final, his ball into space set up Carlos Alberto to score one of the most celebrated goals of all-time. And he did all this at awesome speed. As the Brazilian captain noted: “Pele’s great secret was improvisation. These things he did were done in a moment. He had an extraordinary perception of the game.” (In that respect too, he resembled Mozart, who wrote the overture to the opera Don Giovanni on the morning of its premiere.)
Pele’s greatness risks being obscured by sterile statistical arguments, a lack of footage (his wonder goal against Fluminense doesn’t survive on film) and recency bias, particularly pervasive since the advent of the Premier League. He never, for example, enjoyed the regular prime time exposure granted to Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo in the UEFA Champions League His greatest gift to football was joy, as the footage of Swedish fans’ delight at his genius in 1958 clearly shows.
Many experienced observers came to share that awe. In 1970, a delegation of British managers led by Arsenal’s assistant coach Don Howe watched a Brazilian training session in Mexico. A quarter of a century later, when I asked what it was like, Howe, not normally effusive, replied: “It was like we’d all died and gone to football heaven.” And in that realm, Pele still reigns supreme.