Celebrated Brazilian footballer whose graceful skills made him synonymous with the ‘beautiful game’
The Brazilian’s legend only grew following his unparalleled career as he dedicated his life to the game he shaped and the stars who followed in his immeasurable footsteps.
Pele, footballer
Born on October 23, 1940.
Died on December 29, 2022, aged 82, of colon cancer and a respiratory infection
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Pele popularised the description of football as “the beautiful game” and no one played it more beautifully or with such joy than the man known as the King in his native Brazil. He was the sport’s first global superstar and by common consensus its greatest, although some made competing claims for the Argentinians Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, the Dutchman Johan Cruyff or Portugal’s Ronaldo.
Physically powerful and graced with a feline speed born of liquid joints and spring heels, Pele could absorb the weight of a pass with his first touch and make fools of defenders by skilfully playing the ball off their legs to his own advantage. With his powerful shooting, he could conjure a goal from tight angles or simply walk the ball into the net after dribbling past an entire defence.
If the ball was played off the ground he could leap and hang in the air, although he was only 5ft 9in, and use his powerful neck muscles to guide the ball home, as he did when he headed the first goal of the 1970 World Cup final against Italy. “I feel the greatest skill I have on the football field is to make something out of nothing,” he said.
These were the qualities that brought Pele about 1,281 goals (the precise number is disputed) in 1,363 matches between 1956 and 1978; he scored 77 of them in 92 caps for Brazil, and 1,090 goals in 1,114 games for Santos, his club in Brazil. As well as his record goalscoring, he played in three World Cup winning squads - an unsurpassed tally.
Through it all, Pele’s goggle-eyed fixation on the ball and elastic features exuded the sheer love of playing football, which connected with millions of people especially in the developing world. As a way of coping with fame and adulation that was unparalleled for a footballer, he would refer to “Edson”, his birth name, and “Pele”, as if they were different people: one, the ordinary, mortal man; the other an entity unto itself, a legend, eternal.
In 2001 a reporter suggested to him that he was as internationally famous as the son of God. “There are parts of the world where Jesus Christ is not so well known,” he replied. It was neither a boast nor, in a way, an exaggeration and unlike John Lennon’s 1966 comment about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, it did not result in his being burnt in effigy.
Pele’s talents are such that he is even remembered for the efforts that did not go in, three of which were in the 1970 World Cup: a shot against Czechoslovakia from within the centre circle that went narrowly over, the effort pulled just wide against Uruguay after the goalkeeper, Ladislao Mazurkiewicz, bought one of the cheekiest dummies ever sold, and the header against England that was miraculously saved by Gordon Banks, who recalled Pele shouting “goal” before the goalkeeper somehow scooped the ball over the bar. It was after that match that Pele was photographed swapping shirts with Bobby Moore in one of sport’s most enduring images, capturing the spirit in which Pele thought the game should be played. He felt that football could bring peace to the world and Pele himself could certainly do so: in the late 1960s the civil war in Nigeria stopped for the duration of his visit.
Pele was a branding phenomenon, for decades the most recognisable and marketable name in football
He was born Edson Arantes do Nascimento in 1940 in the mining village of Tres Coracoes in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. His story began when he collected peanuts which fell from freight trains and sold them to buy shirts for his youth team in Bauru, who played barefoot. His father, Dondinho, a footballer in the 1940s, had instilled a love of the game into the infant Dico, as the family called him, while his mother, Dona Celeste, who carried the authority in their home, fashioned his values, which had a profound religious basis. She did not want Pele to become a footballer, resenting that his father had been forced by poverty to play when damaged ligaments in his right knee made him unfit to do so.
He acquired his nickname at school but never knew why, and initially spurned it because he felt proud to be named Edson in honour of Thomas Edison. His family moved to Bauru, close to Brazil’s largest port, Santos. There he learnt his football on the streets, kicking around a bundle of socks. “The pleasure of kicking that ball, making it respond to an action of mine, was the greatest feeling of power I had ever had,” he later recalled.
When he was 13 his father enrolled him with the Noroeste youth team, where his mentor was the former Brazil inside forward Waldemar de Brito, and for whom he soon scored nine goals in an 11-0 win. Pele’s first pay day at Bauru came when his youth team won a local championship and the delighted fans tossed coins on to the pitch.
Pele’s dream, at one stage, was to be an airline pilot, but already it was clear that his future lay in football. At 15, with the encouragement of De Brito, he joined the Santos youth set-up. The senior players dubbed the new arrival “Gasolina” and began by asking him to run their errands. A year later he was the first choice inside left and in 1957 he made his international debut, aged 16, scoring in a 2-1 defeat by Argentina in Rio de Janeiro.
His first World Cup came in 1958, when Brazil won the trophy for the first time, beating Sweden, the hosts, 5-2 in the final after thrashing France 5-2 in the semi-final. Pele, not yet 18, scored a hat-trick in the semi-final and twice in the final.
His first goal in the final was a marvel: he controlled the ball on his chest, flicked it over the head of a defender and volleyed the ball home as it dropped. “Who can live with this sort of stuff?” wrote the Times football correspondent Geoffrey Green. His second goal, a clever header that looped over the goalkeeper, sealed Brazil’s first World Cup victory. Pele, the youngest World Cup scorer and winner, wept uncontrollably as the team paraded the trophy.
In 1959 he scored 125 goals in all matches. One of them, against England in a 3-1 win for Brazil at the Maracana stadium in May 1959, was recalled by a bamboozled Bobby Charlton in his autobiography: “He sold me a perfect dummy and raced on our goal, leaving me struggling in his wake. With hardly a change of stride he sent me one way, and then went another. It was as if I’d been foolish enough to try to catch a gust of wind . . . He hit the ball from about 30 yards and it just looped inside the post. I looked at my boots, sighed and said, ‘Bloody hell’. It was maybe the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard or seen on a football field.”
He was still playing for Brazil while doing his military service, during which time he was sent off in a match between Argentinian and Brazilian army teams. Though generally restrained despite being a frequent target of opponents’ brutality, Pele was not always a model of good conduct: in a tournament in Brazil in 1964 he broke the nose of his Argentinian marker, Jose Mesiano, although he seemed distracted, and possibly guilt-racked, for the rest of the game.
Brazil successfully defended the World Cup in Chile in 1962 but it was a disappointing and violent tournament. Pele started with a stunning solo goal against Mexico but pulled a muscle against Czechoslovakia while attempting a long-range shot and was unable to play in the rest of the tournament.
In 1966 there was great excitement in seeing the magical and then still slightly mysterious Brazilians at the World Cup in England. Pele scored in their first group game, a 2-0 win over Bulgaria, but when they lost an encounter with Hungary in their second match it left them needing to beat Portugal to qualify for the quarter-finals. It was a match that brought together Pele and his only serious contemporary rival for the mantle of the world’s greatest footballer, Eusebio. However, it was a huge disappointment, the Portuguese defenders cynically targeting Pele with the most crude of fouls. The image of Pele being helped off the pitch with damaged knee ligaments and a blanket draped around his shoulders became one of the most enduring of the tournament. Exhausted and embittered, he vowed never to play in the World Cup again.
Gradually he came round and after careful consideration made himself available for the World Cup in 1970. Joao Saldanha, the coach, was thought not to be enthusiastic about Pele, but he was replaced by Mario Zagallo, a team-mate of Pele’s, at the 1958 and 1962 World Cups, just before the tournament began. Pele was assured a place in the side.
Mexico 1970 provided confirmation, if any were needed, of Pele’s greatness and became the most famous tournament of them all, chiefly because of the sensational football played by Brazil in winning the trophy for the third time. In the final in the Aztec Stadium in Mexico City, they beat Italy 4-1, and Pele nonchalantly conducted what became a celebration of “samba football” - each mention of his name by the television commentators bringing an instant frisson of excitement. Pele scored the first goal and created two more. Immediately after the match he was stripped by fans of everything apart from his underpants. (In 2002 the shirt was sold at auction for pounds 158,000.) “How do you spell Pele?” The Sunday Times asked, then answered: “G-O-D”.
The previous year he had become the first footballer to score 1,000 goals after converting a penalty in a league match for Santos against Vasco da Gama at the Maracana stadium in Rio, the temple of Brazilian football. As reporters ran on to the pitch to capture his reaction, he used the moment to give a speech urging people to “help the children, help the helpless”.
Wealthier European clubs had long hankered to sign Pele but in 1961 Janio Quadros, Brazil’s president, had declared him a “national treasure” who could not be sold to a foreign club. When he finally left Santos in 1974, the No 10 shirt was retired. A commemorative plaque in the Maracana stadium describes “the most beautiful goal ever seen”, which came when playing for Santos in 1961. He dribbled past the entire Fluminense team before hitting the back of the net.
After Pele’s retirement in Brazil in October 1974 - he played the first 20 minutes of his final game for Santos and then departed in tears - he was almost bankrupted by bad business deals. He had earned a large amount from the building industry and advertising Brazilian coffee, but had not been well advised.
His investment in Fiolax, an automobile parts company, proved particularly costly: he owned only 6 per cent of the shares but acted as a guarantor for a bank loan, leaving him with a bill of more than dollars 1 million when the company collapsed.
Perhaps this helped to explain why in 1975 he signed a multimillion-dollar contract with the New York Cosmos - a move facilitated by Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state, who was an influential admirer. The deal made Pele for a time the best-paid athlete in the world and his arrival prompted a media frenzy.
Having scored 55 goals in 105 games, his last match came in 1977, in front of a crowd of 77,000 at the Giants stadium in New Jersey, when he played for the Cosmos in the first half - scoring with a 35-yard free kick - and for Santos in the second. After his final game he made the crowd chant the word “love”.
One event at the White House underlined Pele’s celebrity even in a famously soccer-resistant nation. “My name is Ronald Reagan, I’m the president of the United States of America,” the president said, telling his guest: “But you don’t need to introduce yourself, because everyone knows who Pele is.”
He was frequently associated with projects to help poor children play football and became an ambassador for Fifa, though his relationship with the governing body was at times uneasy. In 1993 he accused the Brazilian Football Confederation of corruption. It was run by Ricardo Teixeira, the son-in-law of Joao Havelange, then Fifa president. As a result, Pele was excluded from taking part in the World Cup draw ceremony the next year.
He had revealed his political ambitions in 1984 when he said that he wanted to become the first black president of Brazil. He did not ascend that high but in 1995 he became Brazil’s extraordinary minister for sports (following in the footsteps of his fellow footballer Zico).
The country’s first black minister, he held the position until 1998 but was frustrated by resistance from entrenched interests and failed to push through legislation aimed at modernising and cleaning up Brazil’s rotten football infrastructure. Some wondered whether his own sports companies would have profited from his planned reforms. Despite Havelange’s opposition - he even threatened to ban Brazil from the World Cup - he did succeed in introducing the so-called Pele Law, which improved players’ freedom of movement between clubs.
Pele also appeared in a number of films, most notably in John Huston’s 1981 Escape to Victory about Allied prisoners of war who turn down the chance to escape through the Paris sewerage system at half-time, to secure a draw against a Nazi team that is winning an exhibition match thanks to a biased referee. In one memorable scene when the captain, played by Michael Caine, is drawing a complicated tactical diagram on a blackboard, Pele snatches the chalk and draws an unbroken zigzagging line to the opposition goal to indicate his own tactic of scoring. Inevitably Pele delivers the coup de grace with an overhead kick to level the match before the ecstatic crowd in Paris carries the players away to freedom.
The romantic, if rather far-fetched, story appealed to Pele’s sensibilities. In his leisure time he strummed on his guitar, composed songs or wrote simple, idealistic poems. In 2006 he released an album of original football-inspired compositions. Eight years later a Pele Museum opened in Santos with more than 2,500 exhibits.
In 1997 he was appointed an honorary KBE. “The Queen and her husband were completely relaxed,” he wrote in his 2007 autobiography (there were five other such books), “so much so that as we approached she asked right away if maybe I could come and play for Liverpool, which I took to be her team.”
He married Rosemeri dos Reis Cholbi in 1965 in a small religious wedding at his parents’ house. They divorced in 1982. They had two daughters, Kelly and Jennifer, and a son, Edinho, who played in goal for Santos and later coached at the club. In 2014 Edinho was convicted of laundering money raised from drug trafficking. He was initially sentenced to 33 years in prison but was released for good behaviour after serving only three. Kelly became an actress and singer, studying at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York and founding the Walkabout Theater Company in Manhattan.
The separation from his first wife allowed Pele to make the most of Manhattan’s nightlife. The Cosmos players were regulars at the louche celebrity hangout Studio 54. On a trip to Toronto, young women posed as chambermaids in efforts to enter his hotel room. “I still had some of those hormones that had driven me crazy as a boy. There were many girlfriends and parties,” he wrote.
“I can remember bumping into George Best a few times and we became mates. He used to always chide me: ‘What kind of king are you? You don’t drink, you don’t smoke!’ I used to always joke back that I was sure he wasn’t European - that he must have had some Latin in him.”
During the 1980s he dated two Miss Brazil winners and a model known as Xuxa, who had posed for Playboy. When she landed a job presenting a children’s television show, Pele negotiated a deal with the magazine: he would give them an interview in exchange for the negatives from the photoshoot, so they could never be used again.
In 1994 Pele married Assiria Seixas Lemos, a gospel singer and psychologist. In 1996 they had twins - a boy, Joshua, and a girl, Celeste. They divorced in 2008.
An affair with a journalist named Lenita Kurtz in the late 1960s produced a daughter, Flavia, who became a physiotherapist. A fleeting liaison with a maid, Anisia Machado, led to the birth of another daughter, Sandra, who died of cancer in 2006 aged 42. Pele refused to recognise her until 1996 when she won a five-year court case that confirmed him as her father and gave her the right to use his name. Two years later she wrote a book, The Daughter the King Didn’t Want. The saga harmed his reputation in Brazil and he did not attend her funeral.
In August 2014 he announced plans to marry Marcia Aoki, a businesswoman 32 years his junior. However, that November he spent time in a special care unit in Sao Paulo after treatment for a urinary infection following surgery to remove kidney stones. They did subsequently marry, in 2016.
Through it all Pele remained a branding phenomenon, for decades the most marketable name in the sport. He was even paid to tie his bootlaces in the 1970 World Cup. Ahead of the tournament, the “sneaker wars” between Adidas and Puma had become so intense that the rival manufacturers agreed not to enter a bidding war for Pele’s services. However, a Puma representative quietly worked out a deal. Part of the agreement was that shortly before kick-off in the final, with the world watching and the cameras trained on him, he would pause to tie his Puma boots.
In 1991 he founded Pele Sports and Marketing but in 2001 it was accused of stealing dollars 700,000 linked to Unicef and was wound up soon afterwards. Pele explained the scandal by saying he had placed too much trust in his business partner.
In 1999 he was named the International Olympic Committee’s athlete of the century, and a year later, Fifa footballer of the century - jointly with Maradona, who was something of a rival, though 20 years his junior.
While Maradona was anarchic and subversive, a problematic role model, Pele seemed the very definition of how a sporting hero should be. He radiated a cheerful decency, a wholesome sort of innocence that was reflected in his philanthropic instincts and his fair play on the field.
Yet Maradona styled himself as not only a superior player but a more authentic personality than Pele, whom he depicted as a friend of the self-satisfied football establishment and a bland and supine corporate yes-man.
Certainly it sometimes appeared as if Pele was willing to lend his name to anything if the price was right. In the early 2000s he became the butt of jokes by promoting Viagra, the erectile dysfunction drug.
Even in his seventies his brand generated tens of millions of dollars a year, especially as Brazil prepared to host the 2014 World Cup. Legends 10, a New York-based marketing and rights management agency founded by two British businessmen, was formed in 2012 to better exploit Pele’s commercial potential. Pele owned one third of the company, which said in 2014 that it had secured dollars 100 million of deals.
Sprightly even after a hip replacement and inevitably jocular and sharply dressed in public appearances, he crisscrossed the globe and was sought after by a slew of international companies, from Coca-Cola to Swiss watchmakers.
Though for many black Brazilians Pele was a symbol of social mobility, he was also a divisive figure in his homeland thanks to his forays into politics and the way in which his every utterance and action was scrutinised by the media and sometimes sensationalised. “Pele’s a poet when he doesn’t speak,” Romario, the former forward, said.
There were spats with Ronaldo, the former Brazil striker, and Luiz Felipe Scolari, the former Brazil manager. He was critical of the country’s preparations for the 2014 World Cup. However, in 2013, when there were widespread public protests about the cost of living and the price of hosting the competition, he upset many of his countrymen by urging them to focus on supporting the team.
It was a naive stance but consistent with his faith in football’s potential to foster unity and joy. And if the sport at its apogee is an art form, then in Pele there was no finer artist. As he put it: “I was born to play football, just like Beethoven was born to write music and Michelangelo was born to paint.”
THE TIMES
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