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Being immortal is hard work. If you are cursed to live forever, you must defend your legend, or at least be held responsible for it, every day of your existence. The gods have no days off.
Look at Pelé. He became immortal at the age of 17, and in a sense, he hasn’t taken a break since. Seventeen was the age he went to Sweden in 1958 and built a cathedral to his own size. It was then that, as the youngest and best member of Brazil’s World Cup squad, he helped himself to score six goals in the tournament, including two in the final as his country beat 5 hosts. -2. From then on, Pelé became an industry and he and his image have been endlessly revered, exploited and consumed all over the world.
And what a picture. Pelé was so easy to promote because he came out of it perfectly formed. He was technically and tactically superb, and he played with the confidence not of a fearless youngster but of a veteran. His smile on the red carpet made him the cover star of countless magazines and his distinctive haircut, that rising fade, made his profile the most distinctive figure until the arrival of a Michael. Jeffrey Jordan. Football had never seen its blend of speed, skill, agility and vision.
Yet never before in sport, and never again, will the person at the center of an entertainment industry have to do so much to nurture their own myth. Pele retired from football at 33, an age that seems remarkably young until it is considered that by that time he had played in 1,363 games: almost 75 games per season, or a match approximately every five days, for 18 years.
During that time, Pelé had a total of goals he was particularly proud of, finding the net 1,281 times, or 0.94 times per game. This count has recently been the subject of much mockery, the observation being made that several of these matches were friendly matches. This observation misses the point. Pelé wasn’t just paid to play football: he was paid to be paraded. The physical demands placed on him would have horrified most modern physiotherapists, and probably quite a few of his day.
Take, for example, the month of June 1959, a year after Pelé won this World Cup. He has made 15 appearances against clubs from Holland, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and Brazil in that month alone, scoring 20 times. His opposition could vary greatly in quality, but the demands on him and his body did not. He was expected to be Pelé at his best every time, like he was a musician on tour or a circus act. It’s understandable that people, comparing the number of goals scored by Pelé, Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, want to ignore these exhibition games. In a sense, it’s also a meaningless comparison, because despite their amazing consistency over the years, Messi and Ronaldo have never been asked to cope with this excessive workload, with minimal recovery time. between competitions. They have never been asked to play more friendly matches than competitive matches. Meanwhile, Pelé’s promotional career – in terms of matches that occupied his schedule – was even greater than his professional career.
In another sense too, it’s hard to say that Messi or Ronaldo are better than Pelé, just because they played decades apart. Looking at footage from 1958 alongside those from 2007, when a 19-year-old Messi announced himself to the world with a hat-trick for Barcelona against Real Madrid, the most striking difference is in the speed of play. – 1958 World Cup final, as Pelé prepares to shoot, a French defender seems to be strolling rather than rushing towards him; in 2007, as Messi prepares to score his third goal, defenders throw themselves in his way with the elasticity of elite long jumpers. Chances are, someone as dominant in their day as Pelé is still dominant now, but we can’t know for sure.
The impossibility of knowing, however, is no comfort to Pelé. When it comes to soccer he is a god, but as gods in other contexts know all too well, just being in Heaven doesn’t make you immune to challenges. If Pelé were a Greek god, he would be Zeus: the greatest of the names in his firmament, often recognized as the king of everything he studies, but constantly coming into conflict with supposedly inferior beings.
Take, for example, the subject of his comparison with Messi. You would think Pelé was so sure of his own accomplishments that he wasn’t threatened by anyone else, but his judgment of the Argentine genius in 2018 revealed some insecurity. In short, he went full Zeus. Contact the Brazilian newspaper Newspaper, Skin argued, “How do you compare a guy who directs the ball well, shoots the left, shoots the right and one who only shoots with one leg, has only one skill and doesn’t direct the ball well? How can you compare? To compare with Pelé, it has to be someone who shoots well with the left, shoots well with the right and scores heads.
Leaving aside the fact that criticizing Messi for mostly using his left foot is like complaining that Michelangelo didn’t paint enough with his right hand, it’s easy to see why Pele seems outraged at times. Time and time again he is reminded that he was just the greatest of the time, not of all time – an icon of the black and white television age, while Diego Maradona and, arguably, , Messi are the kings of all we have. seen in technicolor. Plus, Pelé had the pressure of being one of football’s first young superstars, a level of scrutiny that should have been overwhelming. This weight of expectation was not particularly kind to George Best, or more recently to Mario Götze. Pelé not only carried that weight, but he thrived under it, leading Brazil to another World Cup victory in 1970.
Maybe, despite being celebrated for decades, Pelé still feels like he isn’t appreciated enough. It is important to remember the context in which he made himself known. He was a dark-skinned black man raising his country’s world status to thrilling heights barely 70 years after officially ending black slavery. He began to achieve these feats on the world stage just a year after Ghana gained independence from its colonial power in 1957, and while apartheid had been underway in South Africa for only 10 years. By the time he arrived in New York to play for the Cosmos in 1975, interracial marriages had been legal in all parts of the United States of America for less than nine years. Black people weren’t supposed to roam the world as freely as he did, and for that he will remain an icon.
While there are any harsh caveats to his legacy, they mostly relate to how he used his platform – or, more specifically, how he didn’t. Pelé’s ascendancy came at a time when black anti-racism activists were murdered en masse, and its heyday coincided with the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Fred Hampton. Yet when it comes to politics, Pelé – unlike his contemporary Muhammad Ali – has remained rigorously silent, even as his country has moved from the somewhat optimistic democracy of the 1950s and early 1960s to the dictatorship of the Medici years.
It is striking, in a new Netflix documentary about Pelé, to see what his friends and associates are saying about his reluctance to face politics. Juca Kfouri, an esteemed commentator, points out that Ali took his stand in a democracy, which was supposed to be much safer than living under authoritarian rule in Brazil. Still, that would have been of little comfort to Ali, whose several friends were killed in this same democracy. On the other hand, there is the record of Paulo Cézar Lima, who was a member of the Brazilian team that won the World Cup in 1970. “I love Pelé, but that will not prevent me from criticizing him,” said Lima. . “I thought his behavior was that of a black man who said, ‘Yes, sir. “A submissive black man, who accepts everything and who does not answer, does not question and does not judge. It is a criticism that I still blame him today. Because a single statement would have gone a long way in Brazil . ”
This statement never came. Considering how vigorously Pelé has protected his brand in recent years, it’s fair to say that he’s not so much submissive as he is supremely self-aware. He has long known exactly what he is worth and how quickly he would pay costs to oppose an authoritarian regime. There is a wide range of things Pelé perhaps could have done in this political climate, and perhaps he felt that by staying in Brazil and playing his best, he was doing his fellow citizens enough service. What is striking, however, is that even since Brazil’s exit from dictatorship in 1985, Pelé has not spoken out much more on social issues; that in itself says a lot.
If Pele has been unhappy at all – and unhappy is a strange word to describe someone who has won so much, won so much and loved so much – it is because he was the first to be worshiped in the world, and the first must inevitably give way. His joy, and his curse, is that he set the standard by which others are judged. The problem with setting the standard is that ultimately the standard leaves no one in awe, in the same way that there is little international fanfare every time someone now climbs Mount Everest. What Pelé did at the 1958 World Cup was the football equivalent of landing on the moon, but now NASA probes barely glance at the moon en route to Mars.
For better or for worse, Pelé is our yardstick. One of the main reasons we were so dazzled by a young Ronaldo at the 1998 World Cup and a young Kylian Mbappé at the 2018 World Cup was that they reminded us of his exploits in 1958, 1962 and 1970: that dominating this tournament was a certainty. path to instant legend. And this is where Pele, despite all his worry about being a forgotten older god, must finally find solace. Because people will always be looking for new gods, ones they can identify with in their time. But whoever these gods are, Pelé’s legacy is to be the canvas on which they must paint their greatness.
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