Football is rarely simply football, and football players are rarely simply football players. Pelé was a terrific forward, a player of grace and invention, explosive speed and exceptional balance, but this is not why his death on Thursday elicited such broad grief. Neither are the three World Cups or two Copa Libertadores that he won.
To answer the question of why Pelé was significant with a list of his attributes or medals is to miss the point: he was significant because of what he represented.
But defining what he stood for is nearly difficult, not least because, especially after his playing career ended, his ability to represent nearly anything made him an advertiser’s dream.
He existed in a perfect commercial environment, as a person of stature and charisma who was also a blank canvas, able to promote nearly anything, from Puma to Pepsi, Viagra to diamonds created by heating and applying enormous pressure to his hair.
This characteristic allowed Pelé to imply practically anything that was required of him. For my generation, which was a little too young to have seen him play, he was always the standard, the name that embodied football brilliance.
“Pelé” was the player your non-football-watching grandmother had heard of, the unavoidable hero of “Escape to Victory,” and the name that would be yelled in the schoolyard whenever someone accomplished something exceptional.
In this aspect, the name itself is extremely crucial. Would we have been as eager to yell his name if he had retained the name, Edson? “Pelé” is memorable. It may be a corruption of “Bilé,” a goalie Pelé admired as a youngster (his name is rumored to have been derived from an incantation used by the wise ladies of his tribe as they gathered around his cot at moonlight, attempting to draw him from muteness), nevertheless, it is an excellent brand name. Pelé sounds more exotic than the word “play.” It begins with a burst of energy and quickly transitions into something svelte and enticing.
Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say that with his death, a lingering fragment of childhood innocence also passed away, but the passing of such a constant, the first global football superstar, the earliest member of what, post-Qatar, it seems appropriate to refer to as the Great Trinity, is a marker of mortality.
You did not have to be born when Pelé’s career was winding down with the New York Cosmos to view him as a symbol of something purer. The two-legged final of the 1963 Libertadores, in which he overcame harsh tackling to lead Santos to a 5-3 aggregate triumph over Boca Juniors, was likely his finest moment.
But his most famous performances, the ones that cemented him in the hearts of the world, were in the 1970 World Cup, a tournament that has a mythical place in the collective memory of football fans.
The mythology of Pelé required this tournament. In 1958, he was 17 years old when he made his World Cup debut in the third group game and scored six goals, including two in the championship match. He represented youth, happiness, and magical promise, but Didi and Vavá were the true stars.
In 1962, he was wounded in the second game of the tournament and was forced to withdraw. He may have contributed to two World Cup victories, but neither was his World Cup.
In 1966, the footage of him being dragged off the Goodison Park field with an overcoat wrapped over his shoulders, having been thrashed and thrown out of the World Cup by Bulgaria and Portugal, became emblematic of the change in football.
After the individualism that characterized Brazil’s 1958 and 1962 victories (which were supported by the radical innovations of zonal marking and a back four), England’s victory was founded on physicality and systematization. The pressing era had begun.
In 1970, Mexico opposed that. The first World Cup is to be televised by satellite and in color. In the Mexican heat, the yellow shirts and cobalt shorts shimmered with enchantment. Everything felt thoroughly contemporary: the ball, the Telstar, was named after a satellite, and its black-and-white panels remained the standard for depictions of a football.
Brazil had prepared by participating in a NASA training program. However, Mexico was a tactical throwback. The heat and altitude necessitated that the constant running required by pressing be moderated. Individualism, a squad consisting of five No. 10s, the best of which donning the number 10 for the final time, may flourish. 1970 was Pelé’s year to compete.
The innocence was not merely tactical. By 1974, Joo Havelange had succeeded Stanley Rous as president of Fifa, and the commercialization of football had begun. In 1970, when little was sleek and not everything was for sale, there was a naiveté that would become increasingly alluring.
However, it was a peculiar type of innocence. Hugh McIlvanney of the Observer described Brazil’s performance against Italy in 1970 final as “a distillation of Brazilian football, its beauty and élan, and almost unadulterated ecstasy… It was not difficult to think that they were eager to comment on the game as well as themselves.”
Nevertheless, the dictatorship of General Emlio Médici exploited a Brazilian team for propaganda objectives, despite the team’s lack of culpability. Mexico in 1970 was ruled by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, which practiced torture and extrajudicial assassination as a matter of course and carried out killings of student demonstrators in 1968 and 1971.
Despite this, “Mexico 1970” has become a slang term for this football concept. The black background was mostly disregarded; even the coverage exhibited an air of innocence.
And at the center of these contradictions stood Pelé, the greatest player of arguably the greatest World Cup, a symbol of something wholesome yet otherworldly, a tremendous brand who, in effect, became a walking advertisement for both products and, less willingly, a dictatorship.
The genuine Pelé? Tosto, his teammate in 1970, remarked that the real Pelé was the public Pelé and that the private Edson no longer existed. He was many things to many people, but maybe most importantly, Pelé represents lost innocence.
