Thousands packed into the Empire Stadium in Gzira on 16 April 1975 to watch a footballing event like no other.
The event was a training session for young footballers – not one which would usually set the hearts racing. The difference to any other training session however, was the coach.
Pelé, arguably the greatest footballer to ever kick a ball, was the coach for the day, and he gave the lucky youths a training session they wouldn’t forget.
Video footage captured by Reuters and shared by Gzira mayor Conrad Borg Manche shows the Brazilian legend donning a tracksuit and putting the lucky players through their physical paces.
He was in the country at the behest of Fr Hilary Tagliaferro, whom he had befriended when the Maltese priest went to Mexico to cover the 1970 FIFA World Cup – which Pele’s Brazil won.
Fr Hilary interviewing Pelé when he came to Malta in 1975
“The place where I was staying was very close to Brazil’s training ground,” Fr Hilary recalled when asked how the friendship came about in an interview with The Malta Independent last month.
“I made friends with an Argentinian journalist who already knew Pelé and he introduced me to him. That connection continued and I used to meet him every four years at the World Cup,” he continues.
“I found out that he was, first and foremost, a very religious person. In fact he wouldn’t let me leave his hotel room before I gave him a blessing. He used to kneel before me: the first time that he did it, he shocked me because I saw him as an idol and then I saw him kneeling in front of me. He would insist that because I was a priest he wanted a blessing from me before he went,” Fr Hilary recalls.
He insists, like many others, that the Brazilian was the greatest to ever play football.
Pelé was born Edson Arantes do Nascimento in Sao Paolo state, Brazil in 1940. His early years were the same as many football players who preceded him and countless who then followed and were inspired by him: born into poverty, introduced to the game by a family member, later becoming obsessed by a sport that taught him about life and gave him opportunities.
Youth team football came first, in 1953, when he signed for his local club, Bauru. But it was his first professional club, Santos, that propelled Pelé toward stardom. Having moved there in 1956, he played 636 matches and scored 618 goals before leaving in 1974. Not just the beating heart of the team, Pelé was also an immense, one-club loyalist.
Long before the feats of modern-day stars Cristiano Ronaldo or Erling Haaland, Pelé blazed a goal-scoring trail that marked him out as being significantly different to other players around him. Similarly, he displayed levels of skill which even today mean that some observers of the game place the Brazilian ahead of the likes of other contenders for the title of Greatest of All Time: Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona.
Within a year of signing for Santos, Pelé made his debut for Brazil, three months short of his 17th birthday. He scored in that game against Argentina, and 65 years later he remains the Brazilian national team’s youngest-ever scorer.
A year later, in 1958, this young player helped his national team win the World Cup in Sweden. Then again in 1962, at the World Cup in Chile, and once more at the 1970 tournament in Mexico.