Pelé: The Story of Football's GOAT
From humble beginnings to the best in the world game, this is the inside story of the greatest footballer of all time
On the 29th December, 2022, when much of South Africa was either travelling to the beach, or on the beach, or returning from the beach, Pelé, possibly the greatest footballer the world has ever seen, died as a result of organ failure following the spread of colon cancer. South Africa wasn’t only on holiday at the time – they were on holiday from the media. Pelé’s death was barely registered, whether this was online or in the newspapers, who were operating with skeleton staff and an erratic publication cycle.
This month is the anniversary of Pelé’s birth in 1940 in a small town in the state of São Paulo. Given that it would have been his birthday a couple of days ago, in this week’s podcast we have a good long look at Pelé and a good long look at Pelé’s Brazil, a land of spirits, coffee and military dictatorships. He was a man not only with the wrong name (more of this in a moment) but a nickname he couldn’t remember getting. This is his story. _________________________________________________________________________
PELÉ’S FULL NAME is a bit of handful, so let’s get it out of the way first, shall we? Edson Arantes do Nascimento, was the older of two sons born to Joao Ramos do Nascimento and Celeste Arantes on the 23rd of October, 1940. Edson was poor but his family weren’t so poor that they didn’t allow themselves to be graced by the wistfulness of aspiration. His parents wanted him to be named after Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, an early prototype of the lightbulb and the motion picture camera, so the fact that he was named Edson seems to have been a bureaucratic mistake.
Somehow, the “i” in Edison went walkabout along the way, possibly as his illiterate parents tried to communicate his name to the clerk writing out his birth certificate, and Edson he became. In later life the man himself argued that he was rather fond of Edson, who was rooted and normal and mortal. This was in contrast to Pelé, a superstar and almost a deity in Brazil, who was immortal and celestial was never allowed to even remotely resemble normality.
The nickname Pelé is thought to have come from Edson’s mis-pronunciation of Bilé, who was the goalkeeper of local club Vasco da Gama when Edson was growing up. Edson tried to distance himself from his nickname but the more he complained, the more others decided it best to ignore him and Pelé became two Pelés. The first man was the football hero with the cute nickname people thought they knew. The second man was named after Thomas Edison. Together both Pelés – or perhaps just one of them? – lit up the football world.
Pelé, in a sense, was an invention, but a complicated invention because his nickname was never of his own making, although, of course, he made the Pele myth. Pelé accepted this as the price of fame but behind that – in a kind of withdrawn role – lurked Edson. Although Edson had his feet firmly on the ground, he, too was an invention, an invention Pelé’s superstar-self relied on to keep him sane. As he said when he was growing older and had time to reflect on the trappings of beatification in Catholic Brazil: “Edson is the person who has the feelings, who has the family, who works hard, and Pelé is the idol. Pelé doesn’t die. Pelé will never die. Pelé is going to go on forever. But Edson is a normal person who is going to die one day – and people forget that.”
Dondinho, Pelé’s dad, and Zoca, his younger brother, both played football. Dondinho was a good player for, amongst other clubs, Fluminense, and he was good enough nudge Pelé along and to give his eldest son a glimpse of football’s Promised Land. In his teens, Pelé started playing futsal. He has credited futsal with both sharpening and rounding him. He became more quick-witted, he has said, more attuned to what was possible on the larger football pitch. Futsal isn’t football lite, it is football squared. Everything happens more quickly in a shorter space of time on the futsal pitch. Futsal was his finishing school.
As a gifted young player Pelé was spotted by a former Brazil player called Waldemar de Brito who took him off to Santos where he became a professional. He played for Santos for 18 years, scoring 643 goals in 659 appearances. Despite being an object of desire for many a European club, including Juventus, Real Madrid, Valencia and Manchester United, he never played for any other club until his move to New York Cosmos in 1974.
In September 1956, as a 15 year-old, Pelé scored on debut for Santos in a 7-1 win. Less than a year later, he made his debut for Brazil in a 2-1 victory over Argentina at the Maracanã, also scoring a goal. A year after that, he played in the World Cup in Sweden as a 17 year-old.
Brazil were drawn in a qualifying group with Austria, England and the USSR. Most probably because of a knee injury, Pelé sat on the bench during Brazil’s opening 3-0 win against Austria. He played no part in the subsequent 0-0 draw against England and it was only during Brazil’s last group match against the USSR that he started, scoring a goal in a 2-0 win.
He wore the number 10 shirt with which he was to become synonymous against the USSR but the fact that he was assigned a shirt with the number 10 on it was purely co-incidental. The Brazilian federation apparently didn’t link particular players to particular numbered shirts, and Pele’s shirt was a random choice imposed upon the team by the Fifa organisers.
By now a feature of the team, despite his tender years, in Brazil’s semi-final against France he scored a second-half hat-trick for Brazil to run out 5-2 winners, a score-line they repeated in the final against hosts, Sweden. The final was watched by King Gustav Adolf the sixth, who was crowned shortly before his 68th birthday. Imagine waiting 68 years for your first goal? The Swedes scored first in the final; after that it was all Brazil. The King was not amused.
History has a way of smoothing out any rough edges in Brazil’s 1958 World Cup narrative. It tends not to tell us they entered the tournament apprehensively. In 1950, Brazil hosted the World Cup, a tournament rendered odd by having two groups of four, one of three and one of two, with France and India withdrawing.
The four group winners advanced not to a knock-out stage but to a round-robin, where the two top teams – Uruguay and Brazil – effectively contested the final. In front of 173 850 fans at the Maracanã, Brazil squandered an early second-half lead to be beaten 2-1 by Uruguay. Four years later in Switzerland, wearing their distinctive yellow shirts with the green collars for the first time, they were beaten 4-2 in an ill-tempered quarter-final by Hungary subsequently dubbed “The Battle of Berne.”
In Sweden they left nothing to chance. The tournament was held in June, summertime in Sweden, and team officials asked that those in the nudist colony visible from the hotel’s windows don their kit for the duration of the World Cup. The Brazil officials also asked that the hotel’s female staff all be replaced with men. The late 1950s were still a time when it was thought that sex was bad for soccer and that keepy-uppy was a game confined to the feet. The Brazilians even employed a team psychologist according to the author, Alex Bellos. He found Pelé “obviously infantile”, which was slightly unfair. Edson was only 17. Before this,he had never left Brazil.
Finally, the 1958 World Cup – televised live in Sweden, but not live elsewhere, by the way – represented a sea change in the racial composition of the Brazil team. Pelé, Garrincha, the wizard of the dribble, and the defender, Didí, were all black. The Brazil coach, Vincente Feola, seemed reluctant to play them at first. Like Pelé, Garrincha only played his first game of the tournament against the USSR but the team got together and insisted Feola needed to be more adventurous and get with the program. The victory against Wales in the quarter-final was only 1-0 but in the next two matches the Brazilians scored ten dizzy goals.
Eighteen months after the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, Janio da Silva Quadros became president of Brazil, winning 48% of the votes at the polls. A noble eccentric, his immediate aims were to deal with foreign debt repayment and get to grips with the slippery fish of hyper-inflation. One might have thought that this would fill his days to the full, but Quadros had other important things that demanded his attention. He wanted to ban Brazilian women from wearing bikinis on the beach, and he expended time and money in an effort to end gambling. The Brazilian people watched this all and laughed.
Not all of Quadros’ social and cultural schemes were as hair-brained. It was he who declared Pelé “a national treasure”, although he was not yet 20, preventing him from being sold to one of those top European clubs mentioned earlier. Pelé took the national hysteria in his stride. It was a long, easy stride, capable of accelerating fiendishly when he needed to get out of trouble or ghost into space.
His remarkable power came from his out-sized thighs. They gave him formidable shooting range and accuracy with either foot. Although flat-footed, he was quick and agile. Counter-intuitively, because he wasn’t a tall man, he was 1.73 metres tall, or 5 foot eight inches, he was also phenomenal as a header of the ball. “We jumped together,” said Tarcisio Burgnich, the Italian defender given the huge responsibility of marking him in the 1970 World Cup final. “But when I landed I could see that he was still floating in the air.”
When Quadros, the bespectacled man who wanted to ban bikinis on beaches, resigned after only six months in power, the presidency was taken over by João “Jango” Goulart, a left-wing reformist who, in the 1950s, had been the Brazilian Minister of Labour. Goulart’s sensitivity to the plight of workers and his insistence on a minimum wage alienated the upper classes, the Catholic Church, the landowning classes (of which he was part through inheritance from his father) and the urban bourgeoisie.
When “Jango” became president a decade later, his politics also rubbed the USA up the wrong way. As many left-wing South American politicians, intellectuals and revolutionaries have found to their detriment, it is fatal to alienate the USA. They have ways and means of turning your regime to the right, although right and left are often challenging to the Americans’ rudimentary grasp of South American geography. As Ronald Reagan once said: “I’m pleased to be in Bolivia, no Bogota, ah Brazil.” Fearing a Commie conspiracy in Brazil, and aroused by the Cold War in a state of high alert, the US were involved behind-the-scenes in the military coup d’état which led to Goulart’s overthrow in 1964.
Much of our understanding of football in Brazil looks at the country through a lens which enlarges its tribalism, its superstitious natives, its fun, atavistic ritual, sexiness and quirkiness. What it doesn’t stress – perhaps because this is too prosaic – is Brazil’s size. Neither does it stress the size of Brazil’s large but fragile economy, or the role of the military in her politics. After “Jango” Goulart was deposed, for example, a military government took root in Brazil and ruled there for 21 uninterrupted years until 1985.
Untouched and untroubled, Pelé soared above the daily cares of mortals. Edson might have had political views – who wouldn’t have had political views in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s? – but Pelé himself wasn’t going to utter them. Injuries permitting, he preferred to play, offering advice in a colour book I owned as a boy on the correct methods of hygiene and self-care after a match, which included drying yourself off after a shower with a rough towel.
In the book he was pristine in Santos’ all white. I noticed that although he was a professional, his pitch at Santos was exactly like ours at school, worn down to the soil in a patch in front of each goal. In a series of photographs he demonstrated how to take a penalty and a corner, and how to head the ball. Best of all were his rasping banana kicks. I could barely hoof the ball up-field: How was he able to bend a free-kick like a boomerang?
Although not yet 22 at the next World Cup in 1962, he was already vying with the ageing Alfredo di Stefano as the most famous footballer in the world. At 36, Di Stefano was at the other end of the age spectrum. He would play in the 1962 World Cup for his adopted Spain. Unfortunately, he twisted a knee, while Pelé pulled a muscle. This was Di Stefano’s last chance, he would be too old when the next World Cup spun round.
Pelé would go to the 1966 World Cup with an even bigger reputation, a reputation that dictated he be cut down to size. Playing all of their matches at Goodison Park in Liverpool, Brazil started out decently enough, with a win over Bulgaria, but then lost by two goals to Hungary. They played Portugal in their last game and needed to beat them. They lost. Pelé was offered no protection by the referees as he was chopped, late-tackled and butchered. Brazil couldn’t even make the quarter-finals, a national disaster for a country in the third year of military rule.
Playing for Santos against Vasco da Gama at the Maracana in 1969, Pelé was again tripped, something he had grown painfully used to. The referee blew his whistle and pointed to the spot. Pelé was reluctant to take the penalty but his team-mates insisted. “Go on,” they said.
Pelé shrugged his shoulders and looked around, pleading with someone else to take it with word and eyes. It made no difference, his fellow Santos players were adamant, so up he stepped; he placed the ball. In goals, the Argentine goalie and former basketball player, Edgardo Norberto Andrada, guessed correctly and dived the right way. Despite this, he wasn’t quite strong enough to prevent the goal. It was Pelé‘s 1000th for Santos, in a career that had started when he was a boy of school-going age 14 years before.
Six months later was the World Cup in Mexico, the first World Cup to be televised to the world live and in colour. It was difficult not to be blinded by the light. Who can forget Brazil’s butter yellow shirts and pale blue shorts, Italy’s sky blue shirts throughout? Who can forget the famous photograph of Bobby Moore and Pelé swapping jerseys after Brazil’s 1-0 defeat of England in the group stage in Guadalajara?
The image was captured by the Daily Mirror’s John Varley, who had taken a sabbatical from his job to cover the tournament and ended up covering five World Cups. Varley, I discovered in researching this podcast, was a news rather than a sports photographer. He covered the war of succession in Nigeria’s Biafra (Santos, incidentally, toured Nigeria in the middle of the war in 1969) and took widely-praised photos of the troubles in Northern Ireland.
The photo he took after the Brazil versus England match is not in any way dramatic, certainly not in the way he would have been used to, but it is intimate. And there is always a kind of repressed drama in intimacy.
Pele is on the left of the frame as we look at it, while Moore is on the right. Both have their shirts off, Moore carrying Pelé‘s yellow Brazil shirt in his left hand. Pelé has his right arm on Moore’s left shoulder. Both are looking into each other’s eyes. Pelé is saying something, laughing, while Moore is smiling. It’s a timeless image, something that might have been painted hundreds of years ago by a Titian or Caravaggio. It is also an image which shows a time in which there was more time. There is something profoundly relaxed about the photograph, as if Pelé and Bobby can carry on talking for ever, long after everyone has filed out of the stadium and the photographers have snapped their snaps.
In thinking about Varney’s image I am reminded of what the England cricketer, Paul Collingwood once said of One-Day Internationals many years later. “You always have more time than you think,” said Collingwood.
He’s right, and his thoughts can be adapted and extended. Good sportsmen and women always have more time. They can bend time to their will. Pelé and Bobby Moore had so much time on the pitch, they were such accomplished players after all, Moore a defender and Pelé an attacker, they clearly had all the time they needed off of it too. Here they are, swapping shirts and having a natter, having all the time in the world in which to do it. Having just had the time of their lives on the pitch, they’re having the time of their life off of it, too. Kings of time, is what they are, kings of time.
“That photo has gone around the world,” said Pelé. “I think it was very important for football. We demonstrate that it’s a sport. Win or lose, the example, the friendship, you must pass these onto the next generation.”
Having long since made the number 10 shirt his own, Pele and Brazil went on to win the 1970 World Cup, beating Italy 4-1 in the final. It was a sumptuous result in every way. Brazil’s last goal, touched by all 11 players, and laid on by Pelé for Carlos Alberto without looking, was the best. Carlos Alberto blasted it into the roof of Dino Zoff’s net in the Italy goal and everyone went mad. “Such beautiful football ought to be outlawed,” they wrote in the British press.
Pelé’s most audacious moment came in the semi-final against Uruguay. In the clips you see three objects converging: the Uruguayan goalkeeper, Ladislao Mazurkiewicz, dashes off his line while Pelé runs towards him. The ball, meanwhile, rolls in from out of frame, from Pele’s left. You realise that all three are going to arrive at pretty much the same spot at pretty much the same time.
What happens next is truly excellent. Instead of intercepting the ball he’s about to receive, controlling it and dribbling around the Uruguay ‘keeper as you think he’s going to do, Pelé intentionally misses the ball and circles round to retrieve it behind a flabbergasted goalkeeper. Pelé reaches the ball, but as it continues along its trajectory the angle in which he has to kick the ball goal wards is narrowing. Still, this is Pelé, so you know he’s got things under control. But does he? He swivels and kicks the ball towards goal but he’s mis-calculated. The ball rolls harmlessly across the goal face and goes wide.
Many of us remember the sequence culminating in a goal. It should have been a goal. It deserved to be a goal. It had all the ingredients of a wonderful goal except perhaps for accuracy. But it wasn’t a goal. That was Pelé for you. He even scored goals that weren’t goals. He had two names; he had two personas. He scored well over a thousand goals and, in so doing, he lit up not only football but the world.