No sooner do I publish a blog talking about who's the greatest player of all time, than I have to revisit this question because Pelé, one of the game's greatest players ever, has passed away. There was some preparation for this one, because it was announced during the World Cup that he was moving to palliative care for his cancer. He'd been ill for a while, unfortunately, but it was heartening to see, after that announcement, that he held on and communicated to the fans that he was still hanging on. So as I say, it wasn't too much of a surprise that he did then pass away, though of course it's still desperately sad to see one of the greats of the game departing.
In my previous post, talking about who was the greatest player of all time, I talked about how Pelé was the most visible figure even to people who didn't know anything about football. The way I phrased it might have sounded like I had some hipster alternative for the game's greatest player, but I don't want it to be taken dismissively: after all, Pelé was known outside of football because he was a breakout star who symbolized the game and the glamor and romance of the World Cup. In that respect, he's probably even more influential than my pick for most influential, Johan Cruyff.
I also have to confess that I didn't really have much of a sense of Pelé the player because he retired long before I started following the game. I learned about him when I did, of course, even as early as 1994, but unlike Diego Maradona, Pelé came before I was able to hear about relatives in Italy raving about him. Not only that, but some of his game footage doesn't exist anymore, if it ever did: like the very first batch of Dr Who episodes, a lot of those games have been lost forever.
Yet when I did get to see what was there, I couldn't deny it was amazing. One afternoon, for example, I caught the movie of the 1970 World Cup at my grandma's house back in 1998 or 1999, and was transfixed. Along with his teammates, he entertained and played to the crowds while winning possibly the greatest tournament ever.
Since Pelé's passing, I've read a few articles and listened to a few podcasts about his legacy. I think the thing that's stuck with me most from those is how he was seen in the global struggle for civil rights. Specifically, the Guardian compared him to Muhammad Ali, although unlike Ali, Pelé seems to have been in some ways more ambivalent about his place as a symbol. They pointed out that he certainly wasn't outspoken about Brazil's military government, though he later regretted his silence on that topic.
I can't speak to that, especially given the controversies around the Qatar World Cup or the 1978 Argentina World Cup, which I'm reading about currently in a book about Argentine football (Angels with Dirty Faces, by Jonathan Wilson). For someone who lives under a dictatorship like Brazil or Argentina in those years, it's probably not as simple to criticize the government as it is for foreigners outside the country, and if he considered doing so, Pelé must have worried about his family and friends in Brazil, as well as his sponsorships and playing contract.
Nobody's perfect, and nobody makes the right decision in every case. Yet Pelé symbolized the joy of the jogo bonito, the beautiful game, and every football fan in the world from 1958 to the early 1980s knew who he was. Writing this post, I've had in my head that image of him being carried aloft after winning the 1970 World Cup. He was relatively old by then, 12 years on from his debut in the 1958 Sweden World Cup, but he'd just been part of a team that had dominated the tournament like no other. Even after coming out of retirement he was that good, and so, regardless of whether you think he was the greatest player, he was certainly the King, and we won't see someone like that again.
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