The first global football superstar made everyone smile and his tricks were never designed to diminish his opponents
Things were very different in 1966. English fans who had looked forward to seeing him at first-hand were dismayed when he succumbed to the close attentions of Dobromir Zhechev of Bulgaria and Portugal’s João Morais, the two butchers whose relentless tripping and hacking in the group stage resulted in him finally being carried from the Goodison Park pitch by the team’s doctor and masseur, a vision of intense sadness.
“We lived as a real family,” he remembered and the team responded with a series of incandescent performances that bestowed upon them the title, still unchallenged, of the best international team ever seen. Pelé himself left memories of his wonderfully audacious attempts to score by dummying the Uruguayan goalkeeper and by shooting from 60 yards against Czechoslovakia – neither was successful but both left an indelible imprint.
The following season he signed for the New York Cosmos, bankrolled by Warner Brothers, to compete in the North American Soccer League. The US had been the one place in the world he could walk the streets without being mobbed. That would change as, joined in this new adventure by Franz Beckenbauer, he briefly made attendance at a Cosmos game as fashionable as a visit to Studio 54.
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