Pelé, football’s first global superstar, has died at the age of 82. To many fans, the Brazilian will be remembered as the best to have ever played the game.
For others it goes further: He was the symbol of football played with passion, gusto and a smile. Indeed, he helped to forge an image of the game, which even today lots of people continue to crave.
Pelé wasn’t just a great player and a wonderful ambassador for the world’s favourite game; he was a cultural icon. Indeed, he remains the face of a purity in soccer that existed long before big money and global geopolitics infiltrated the game.
It is testament to his legend that everyone from English 1966 World Cup winner Sir Bobby Charlton and current French superstar Kylian Mbappé to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – the former and incoming president of Brazil – and former U.S. President Barack Obama have led tributes to him.
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.
It was at that tournament that an unlikely friendship was struck up: one between Pele and Maltese priest Fr Hilary Tagliaferro.
“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 recalled.
Pele ultimately came to Malta for a three-day visit at Fr Hilary’s behest and with the backing of Pepsi, where he gave a training session to young footballers at a packed Empire Stadium in Gzira.
To those who were there, it remains a once in a lifetime moment.
Pelé’s talent has never been in doubt. Yet it was fortuitous that he played at a time when football was emerging from the shadows cast by global conflict, when the world needed symbols of hope and sporting heroes.
The abiding memory that people will hold is of a man who played football in a way that many of us – both amateurs and professionals – have all aspired to.
Pelé was not only skillful, he also brought great joy to innumerable people across the world, over a period of decades. For all of us, even those with just the slightest interest in football, we will never forget him.