Pele dead at 82: Brazil and Santos footballing great did things nobody else could dream of

The 1970 World Cup felt like the beginning of a new age.

It was the first World Cup broadcast live via satellite – the Telstar, from which the World Cup ball took its name. It was in colour and the most colourful of them all were Brazil, in their sunshine yellow shirts and shorts of cobalt blue, doing extraordinary things in the shimmering Mexican heat. In the immediate aftermath of Brazil’s victory, the Jornal do Brazil said it “compares with the conquest of the moon by the Americans.” They had undergone a NASA training programme and they had produced football that felt, like the moon landings the year before, like a victory for all of humanity. This was modernity, and this was the beauty it could yield.

And at the heart of it was Pele: he was 29, in his fourth World Cup, having essentially been bullied out of the previous one. Even in Brazil there were doubts, as reports began to circulate about his short-sightedness. And yet he did things nobody else could have dreamed of.

That tournament was capped by Carlos Alberto’s goal in the final against Italy, teed up by Pele’s perfectly timed lay-off. It was, in a sense, the distillation of his ability. He was skilful, of course, inventive and far better in the air than his physique might have suggested: he had scored a textbook header earlier in the game. But what really set him apart, what elevated him above the merely brilliant to be one of the greatest was his capacity to see patterns and shapes and possibilities a fraction before everybody else.

For somebody so obsessed by goalscoring – his insistence he scored 1279 goals in his career is accepted by the Guinness Book of Records but includes a lot of friendlies, some of which were genuinely competitive occasions, and some of which were not – it is striking how much of what is memorable about his career involved him failing to score: the dummy against Uruguay, the effort from the halfway line against Czechoslovakia, the header saved by Gordon Banks. What we respond to in him is less his efficiency, prolific as he was, than a sense of imagination and grace: that what he was doing was art.

And that also, perhaps, makes Pele easy to sneer at. For anybody born after about 1960, memories of Diego Maradona doing extraordinary things are far more accessible. Doubts encroach: was Pele actually any good? Or was it just that old football wasn’t all that? Indeed, in the UK, it may be that Pele’s most famous goal was his bicycle kick in Escape to Victory.

Post-career Pele, all the advertising, all the sponsorships, the sense of himself as a global ambassador for, well, Pele (and what an extraordinary bit for branding it was by whichever of his childhood friends coined the nickname Pele, a word without explicit meaning, for the young Edson Arantes de Nasciamento), had an unfortunate naffness.

His celebrated first goal in the 1958 World Cup final, looping the ball over a Swedish defender and volleying in was remarkable because he was 17, but the skill involved would be expected of any modern forward. But look back at, say the 1963 Copa Libertadores final, when his Santos beat Boca Juniors in both legs. Pele scored only the last of Santos’s five goals in the tie, but his performance was remarkable. He was at the heart of everything, playmaker and goalscorer in one. He was brave, taking a fearful kicking, strong, blessed with great balance, but also at a technical level beyond everybody else. And he saw things. He was the lead but also the director.

The sense in which he was a modern player dropped into a previous age gave him an outlandish feel. He was not quite of that world, and that was what gave him such an aura. That’s why, quite apart from all the achievements, the three World Cups, the two Libertadores titles, all the Paulista and Brazilian titles, the legends about how the Biafran War paused so both sides could watch him play, he was so universally hailed as the greatest ever, at least until the advent of Maradona.

Was he the greatest ever? It’s a futile question, insidious in the way it encourages advocates of one of the candidates to pick faults in the others. Far more relevant is that, really, of players who have retired, there are only two, perhaps three, contenders. There is Pele, there is Maradona and, possibly, there is Alfredo Di Stefano, although the fact he never played at a World Cup counts against him (see: nit-picking is implicit in the question).

The bright future promised by the 1970 World Cup ended up an illusion; it was football’s Woodstock. It was not the herald of a golden age of individual attacking talent; rather in the heat and altitude of Mexico, it was the final tournament before pressing and systems football took over for good. Pele was the great icon of the end of that age of football, but his brain and his physical strength helped drag it to modernity.

Whether he was the greatest or not is irrelevant. He was great, and he was the greatest at perhaps the greatest World Cup, that great moment of glorious possibility in Mexico. For that month in 1970, he produced the greatest of which humanity is capable.