I guess there is one man you can’t leave out of any list of football legends – Pele. He just has to be there. I’ve never played against him or met him, and I was too young really to watch him in his prime. It doesn’t matter a bit.
I’d love to say I’d played against him, who wouldn’t? Even in my wildest dreams, I don’t think he’d have turned up at Layer Road in Colchester for a friendly. He might have made it to Highbury as he would still only have been in his forties when I joined Arsenal, but it never happened. I can’t even say that I watched him in his glory days live on TV. I have memories of the televised 1970 World Cup when I was just five and he was the brightest star in a team of Brazilian all-stars, but he quit the international game soon after that.
If people say there is too much football on television nowadays, it’s a shame there was so little when the great man was in his prime. His club career was virtually spent with Santos in Brazil, so he might as well have been playing on the moon for all we knew. Even Brazil’s qualifying matches for the World Cup – on the rare occasions they had to qualify – were all South American affairs, so we only saw him on television once every four years when the finals came round. Yet when you ask anyone who has even the faintest interest in football, ‘Who is the greatest footballer ever?’, there is only one answer: Pele.
I remember my dad Ginge telling me about him and how Pele was only 17 when he played in the 1958 World Cup finals and caused a sensation. He was the youngest player ever to appear in the finals, the youngest goalscorer in World Cup history and the youngest man to pick up a winner’s medal. Seventeen is young now, but, back in the 1950s, it was like having a 14- or 15-year-old in your side. ‘Youngsters’ were 20 or 21, not 17.
I was very young but I remember thinking, Who is this man that Dad keeps going on about? What sticks in my mind is that grainy, almost slow-motion, black-and-white footage of Pele taking a high ball on his chest in the Swedish penalty area in the 1958 final. He controlled it, took it away from the man marking him, flicked it over the head of the defender coming to tackle him and then, as three Swedes closed in, volleyed it past the goalkeeper. As a kid watching those clips, I didn’t realise that, even before the kick-off in that 1958 World Cup game, Pele was already a teenager who had made history.
His name is actually Edison Arantes do Nascimento – he was named after the American inventor Thomas Edison – and his father was a footballer whose career was ended early by a knee injury. His family initially nicknamed him ‘Dico’ but, so the legend goes, at school he couldn’t pronounce the name of his favourite player, Vasco da Gama goalkeeper Bile. It came out Pele, so that’s what the other kids called him. As with a lot of nicknames, the poor guy lumbered with it wasn’t too keen on it. He thought that Pele was such a rubbish name that he was once suspended from school for two days for punching a kid who kept calling him that. You can guess what happened next – they all called him Pele even more often.
The man himself would have preferred to be called Edson, which is practically his real name. ‘Edson sounded so much more serious and important,’ he has said. His family still use the name Dico (I wonder if Lee Dixon knows that?) but that wouldn’t do for a Brazilian footballer, would it?
He’d been born in poverty – we’re talking really poor here – in a shanty town in Bauro, Sao Paulo, and earned extra money by shining shoes on match days at the local football club. The family was so broke they didn’t have a proper football to play with, so the young lad practised with a sock full of newspaper or even a grapefruit! But it was obvious, no matter what he played with, the kid had talent. He could have done keepie-uppies with a stick of rhubarb. When he was 15, he joined Sao Paulo’s massive Santos FC junior team and after just one season made it to the senior level.
Here the nickname problem came up again – at one stage he was called ‘Gasolina’. He says that, as the youngest member of the team, whenever they wanted some coffee brought to them – not difficult in Brazil – he was chosen to fetch it and told, ‘Don’t spare the gasoline.’ Happily, the name didn’t stick, which is a bit of good fortune for everyone. Just imagine: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, tonight meet the greatest footballer in history – Gasolina!’ It sounds like a Brazilian drag queen.
He wasn’t fetching the coffee for too long though. He was in the first team at 16 – he scored on his debut – and at 17 was Santos’s top scorer. He also made his international debut against Argentina – he scored, of course – and was in the party for the World Cup finals in Sweden, where the rest of the world was about to find out what Brazilians already knew.
He didn’t play in the first two games, missing out on a goalless draw against England (the first 0–0 in World Cup finals history), but made it into the starting line-up for the third game, against Russia. He wore the number ten shirt that he, more than anyone else in history, was to make his own. The only surprise was that he didn’t score, but he made up for it by getting the only goal of the game in the quarter-final where Brazil beat Wales – yes, I said Wales – to go through to the semi-finals.
There they took on France and won 5–2, with Gasolina scoring a second-half hat-trick in the space of 23 minutes. He was still only 17. Then came that goal against Sweden in the final. The Brazilians even gave the Swedes a goal start by letting them take a fourth-minute lead just to scare the bookies, but they could have given them two or three and it wouldn’t have made any difference. To cap it all, Pele even scored with a header in the final minute. He was carried aloft by his team-mates at the end of the game and pictures of him sobbing with joy were wired around the world.
The Brazilians had great players like Didi, Zagallo and Garrincha, but it was Pele who was the star of the show. In the four matches he played in, he’d scored six goals, making him joint runner-up in the goals tally behind an astonishing 13 from France’s Just Fontaine. Thirteen goals at a World Cup finals and yet you’re not the name on everyone’s lips – talk about bad timing!
The great shame is that in Europe we hardly saw him at all before the next World Cup in Chile in 1962. Imagine what it must have been like during those four years seeing him play for Santos every week. He was scoring an average of more than a goal a game and, if you take friendlies into account, in two of those seasons he scored a hundred goals or more. It was phenomenal.
There is some blurred film on the internet which looks as though it was taken in the Victorian era, but you can still sense how far above the other players he was. Brazilians were hardly ever allowed to play abroad in those days until they were coming to the end of their careers, so there was also a strong argument for saying that the Brazilian league was the toughest in the world, packed as it was with their best players. I know they’ve never been famous for their defending but that makes no difference – he was scoring goals left, right and centre, year after year.
Pele should have been at his peak in the 1962 World Cup but injury forced him out after just two games. In footage of one of them, however, he can be seen steaming through the Chile defence for a stunning solo goal. Four men are beaten by the run: one is left for dead as he puts the ball one side of him and runs the other, and another is simply bulldozed aside by Pele’s strength. It’s a measure of Brazilian dominance of the 1962 tournament that even without him they won it by a country mile, so he still picked up a winner’s medal. Clubs in Spain and Italy wanted to break the bank to bring him over to Europe but he was declared ‘a national treasure’ and not allowed to leave the country.
England and 1966 should have been the tournament that he dominated above all others, but it wasn’t to be either. He scored in the opening game against Bulgaria despite a constant series of brutal tackles. Defenders reckoned he wouldn’t be much danger if he was in a hospital bed. That meant he missed the next game, a 3–1 defeat by Hungary and returned, not fully fit, for a must-win match against Portugal.
That game is remembered now for the way he was constantly hacked down by the Portuguese. In the second half, he had to hobble off after two vicious tackles by Joao Morais in the space of a few seconds. He limped back on, heavily bandaged, but he was a passenger for the rest of the match as the Brazilians went out of the competition.
The English referee George McCabe, now dead, was widely criticised for the way he allowed the Portuguese to treat the Brazilians, especially Pele. One observer wrote, ‘Pele would say that it was only when he saw the incident on film that he realised how bad it was. He would swear, then, never to play in a World Cup again. The indulgent, flaccid English referee, George McCabe, allowed Morais to stay on the field, so that now Portugal were playing against ten men.’
People often ask how the great players from the past would fare in modern football. Well, I think Pele would be an even greater player today than he was then. The reason is simple: in those days you practically had to kill someone before action was taken against you. Players are much better protected by referees now than they were then.
I think 1966 changed him as a player. He vowed he would never get intimidated or booted off the pitch again and he became a lot more physical himself. Only 5ft 8in tall, he had to protect himself, as it was the law of the jungle. He went back to South America and carried on scoring goals by the lorry load. In 1967, the two sides in the Nigerian civil war even organised a 48-hour ceasefire so they could watch him play in a friendly match in Lagos.
Two years later, he made history again when he scored his 1,000th goal in competitive football. That goal on 19 November 1969 was a penalty – the worst he ever took, he said – against Vasco da Gama in the Maracan Stadium in front of 80,000 fans, not to mention all the TV cameras. Before the kick was taken, Pele and the goalkeeper agreed that Pele should have the ball if he scored and the keeper would have it if he missed. He didn’t miss. Talk about a set-up – you couldn’t choreograph it better, could you? It was in the biggest football ground in the world and with the media all watching. Bit of luck.
Thousands of fans then invaded the pitch and the game was held up for 30 minutes as the crowd went wild. Most of them were home supporters too. It had taken Pele 909 games to become the first man to reach the 1,000-goal milestone and he was carried around the field on the shoulders of the fans holding the ball aloft. Pele then made a speech appealing for better treatment of Brazil’s poor children before the game could be restarted.
After that, how could he top it? Easy really. He decided to play in the Mexico World Cup finals after all. Only after Brazil said pretty please, though. The Brazilian side of 1970 is constantly called ‘the greatest team ever’. Apart from Pele, they had players like Carlos Alberto, Jairzinho, Gerson, Tostao and Rivelino in their ranks and, even though the goalkeeper Felix was a bit shaky, it didn’t matter, because the other team rarely got that far down the pitch.
England, Romania and Czechoslovakia were all beaten in the first round. Pele didn’t score against England – he had to be content with laying on the only goal of the game for Jairzinho – but he did against the other two nations. In the game against the Czechs, he almost scored from ten yards inside his own half, when he saw the keeper off his line in the distance and only missed by a whisper with his long-range shot.
In the semi-final against Uruguay, he came up with my own favourite moment when he raced on to a diagonal ball from Tostao with only the keeper to beat. He left the ball alone to pass one side of the keeper while he ran the other. Then he changed direction and collected it – only to spoil it all by pulling his shot too far back and across the face of the goal. Perhaps he wasn’t a natural goalscorer after all!
In the final, Italy were beaten 4–1. Pele opened the scoring with a header when he rose above the massive Italian Facchetti, and in the dying minutes he gently rolled the ball to Carlos Alberto for the fourth goal. It was just great. It’s still awesome to watch almost four decades later. So Pele ended up with his third World Cup winner’s medal – the only man so far ever to do so.
He played his final game for Santos in 1974 and then finished his career with two seasons at the New York Cosmos. In fact, he only played for those two clubs throughout the three decades he was at the top. Some people might criticise him for ending up playing ‘Mickey Mouse’ football in the States, but I have no problem with it whatsoever. I’m sure he was the best-paid player in Brazil during his career, but he wouldn’t have earned bundles. He’d served his country well and won three World Cups and it was time to go and hunt the filthy dollar.
Pele was still only in his mid-thirties when he then turned out alongside English ex-pros like Charlie Aitken of Aston Villa, Keith Eddy of Watford and Steve Hunt of Aston Villa. He gave football a great boost in the States but it was never going to become the number-one sport there – there’s too much competition from their own home-grown games like American football, baseball and basketball.
In October 1977, he played his last game of football in an exhibition match between the Cosmos and Santos. There was a capacity crowd at the Yankee Stadium and before the kick-off he asked them to say the word ‘love’ three times. Well, it was the 1970s. Pele played the first half for the Cosmos, and – what a turn-up for the books – scored from a free-kick. In the second half, he turned out for Santos. At the end of the match, he ran around the field with an American flag in one hand and a Brazilian one in the other, then he was carried around the field again on the shoulders of the other players. The man must have lost count of the number of times he was carried around a football field in his career.
There’s always a bit of an argument when it comes to career statistics for Pele but it’s generally accepted that he scored 1,282 goals in 1,363 games between 1956 and 1977, scoring a hat-trick 91 times. And there’s more. He hit four goals 31 times, five on six occasions and in one game he hit eight!
If you ask anyone in England to name a famous Brazilian, then they’d all go for Pele – he’s even more famous than Ronnie Biggs. (He’s associated with Brazil anyway, ain’t he?) And there’s only one sportsman who can compare with Pele when it comes to what he achieved and world fame and that’s Muhammad Ali. Of course, Ali was The Greatest to many, but football is the leading sport in the world, without a shadow of a doubt. It’s only in North America where it doesn’t rate as the biggest of all sports. That’s why Pele is so instantly recognised and admired. Plus, of course, his is a great rags-to-riches story.
It didn’t all end there, though. He’s probably just as famous today as he was at the height of his career. In 1992, he was appointed a United Nations ambassador for ecology and the environment, and later he became Brazil’s ‘Extraordinary Minister for Sport’. In 1997, even the Queen gave him an honorary British knighthood.
Pele might not have made the astonishing sums that present-day players earn, but he has become a wealthy man over the years with a variety of sponsorship and business deals. It was recently calculated that he earns around £14 million a year from various endorsement deals ranging from Coca-Cola to MasterCard. The Brazilian oil giant Petrobras paid him to boost its global image with investors, and Coke pays for a mobile Pele museum that travels his home country, featuring his exploits on the pitch. Electronics firm Samsung hired him to act as an ambassador throughout Southeast Asia and he was paid to walk around with a Nokia mobile phone whenever he was in Brazil. He is constantly booked for corporate functions and has admitted, ‘No doubt I am earning more money with my endorsements than I ever earned playing soccer. But I don’t think I’m a very good businessman. I act too much with my heart. I have a big responsibility. So many people trust me.’ That’s why he doesn’t advertise tobacco and alcohol firms.
He also made headlines when he boosted a different kind of ‘keepie-uppie’ campaign – for Viagra. It’s not as though he’s been lacking in firepower himself: he’s had two wives and six children at the last count. ‘I think it is stronger to do an ad when you do not have the problem and are wanting to help, rather than when you do have the problem,’ was his explanation. ‘When you have the problem, of course you will want to help everyone else with the same problem.’
So granddad Pele has no problem with lead in his pencil and wants to make sure no other guys have either. I’ll go along with that.
And what makes him an even bigger hero to me is that he’s all in favour of players having sex before matches too. ‘Having sex is not the problem,’ he says. ‘It’s what comes with it that the coaches are against. Sometimes, the players stay up late and don’t sleep well. And that’s where the problem lies. They must be ready to play.
‘Footballers are humans and there are pressures on them too. People expect them to play their best all the time. When they can’t, it leads to stress. The stress can affect their sex lives. This happens with Brazilian footballers too.’
Why should he be embarrassed to talk about things like that? I don’t think he gives a shit, especially as he says his own sex life is ‘normal’. Goals, beautiful women, kids and Viagra. What a man. And he says he hasn’t minded being called Pele for years now – he’s used to it. Well, that helps doesn’t it?