The displays that won him the affections of the world came in a tournament that itself occupies a mythic zone in football’s collective memory
meant almost whatever anybody needed him to mean. For my generation, slightly too young to have seen him play, he was always the benchmark, the name that defined footballing greatness. “Pelé” was the player your gran who never watched football had heard of, the inevitable hero of, the name that would be shouted across the schoolyard if anybody did anything especially brilliant.
And of course the name itself in that regard is hugely significant. Would we have been so keen to shout his name had he remained Edson? “Pelé” is memorable. It may be a corruption of “Bilé”, a goalkeeper Pelé idolised when he was a child but it is perfect branding. Pelé sounds like a more exotic form of “play”. It begins with an eruption of energy before moving swiftly into something more lithe and seductive.
Perhaps it is too much to say that with his death went also a lingering fragment of childhood innocence, but the passing of such a constant, of the first global football superstar, of the earliest of what, post-Qatar, it seems appropriate to think of as the Great Trinity, is a milestone to mortality.
A mural depicting Pelé lifting the Jules Rimet trophy is seen during a tribute event to the Brazilain legend at a Fan Zone in Qatar during the 2022 World Cup. Images)But you didn’t have to be born as his career was winding down at New York Cosmos to see Pelé as representative of something purer. He was probably at his greatest in the two-legged final of the 1963 Libertadores, when he overcame brutal tackling to inspire Santos’s 5-3 aggregate victory over Boca Juniors.
Mexico in 1970 stood against that. It was the first World Cup broadcast by satellite and in colour. There was a magic to the yellow shirts and cobalt shorts, shimmering in the Mexican heat. Everything felt thrillingly modern: the ball, the Telstar, was named after the satellite, its black and white panels still the default for generic representations of a football.
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