Oh 2022! You were two days away from leaving us all on a memorable note, with that image of Lionel Messi holding the World Cup trophy aloft. But then, you just had to take Pele with you.
The greatest footballer of all time is no more. Edson Arantes do Nascimento, or the artist known as Pele, passed away in Sao Paulo at the age of 82, early on Friday morning after a protracted battle with cancer. As the footballing world focussed all their attention on Qatar, Pele had spent his final month in a medical facility, named after fellow genius Albert Einstein.
It is difficult to explain the impact that Pele had on football half a century after he retired. One could, of course, do it in numbers. At 17 he starred in a World Cup-winning Brazilian side. He still remains the youngest player to start a World Cup final, the youngest player to score in a World Cup final and the youngest to top the scoring charts for his country in a World Cup. It took five decades and Neymar for anyone to match his scoring record for the Brazil national team. His record for his club Santos reads an incredible 643 goals in 659 games. And he still remains the only player in football history to win the World Cup three times.
One could try and measure his significance in terms of the cultural impact that he had on humanity. Pele was football’s first global superstar, the precursor to today’s sporting multimillionaires. One of the earliest marketing coups in sporting history was when Puma paid Pele to tie his shoelaces just before the 1970 final kickoff, so that the cameras could zoom in on his Puma boots during an Adidas-sponsored World Cup. Upon arriving in the US to play for the New York Cosmos, he was invited to the White House and to meet Muhammed Ali. His sojourns across the world has ensured that there is not one country where Pele isn’t synonymous with football. In 1969, he arrived in Nigeria with Santos to play an exhibition game and an ongoing civil war was paused so that everyone could watch him play in peace. One of his many stops was India, where he came with his New York Cosmos side in 1977.
But try as one might, Pele’s genius will always remain unexplainable, indescribable and unquantifiable. You could find one of the lucky surviving few who have watched him play in his pomp. You could seek out the grainy footage on YouTube of his incredible skills and astounding finishes. But all that would be like attempting to describe an elephant after examining the hairs on its tail. Or trying to understand an iceberg with a fragment that broke off from it. Few from the generation that was lucky enough to watch him live, just as we were lucky enough to watch Messi live, would dispute that there was something divine about the way he played football, a reflection of the almighty if you will. Perhaps the best unsuccessful attempt to describe Pele belongs to the Italian poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. “The moment the ball arrived at Pele's feet, football transformed into poetry,” he once remarked.
For now, all we can do is mourn the end of an era, the passing of a genius. And when that is done, we can celebrate him. Rest in peace, Pele!