The tale of Pele’s perfect triumph
There can’t be many famous people still living whose life story, in the eyes of the documentary-makers chronicling it, effectively concludes more than half a century ago.
Yet that is so of the man born edson Arantes do Nascimento in October 1940.
At the end of a new Netflix film called, simply, Pele, there is a fleeting reference to his time with New York Cosmos in the mid-1970s, but otherwise the stirring narrative begins and ends in Mexico City, in 1970, when Brazil won the World Cup for the third time.
The memory of the final, and that glorious 4-1 victory over Italy, still moves 80-year-old Pele to tears, mostly of happiness, but also because he remembers the game as a form of personal redemption.
Pele has had well-documented health problems, and appears in the Pitch Productions film in a wheelchair, but in a candid interview — accompanied by wonderful archive material — his memory seems sharp.
This is not just a film about football. rather, it explains the inextricable connection between Pele and Brazil’s national identity.
Defeat by Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final left the nation traumatised. It was considered the perfect manifestation of Brazilians’ ‘mongrel complex’ — the collective tendency to talk themselves and their country down while praising the greatness of others.
Listening to that game on the radio, nine-year-old Pele, a humble shoeshine boy but already a football prodigy, promised his father that one day he would help Brazil win the World Cup. Just eight years later in Stockholm, he did exactly that.
he scored twice in the 1958 final, which finished Brazil 5 Sweden 2, and is another game that still has the power to move him to tears.
In Brazil, historians credit Pele, and Pele alone, with ending the debilitating ‘mongrel complex’. he became the ultimate symbol of Brazil’s ‘emancipation’.
There were more traumas to come, both for the country — in the shape of 1964’s military coup and subsequent right-wing dictatorship — and for Pele himself. he had been kicked out of the tournament by the time Brazil won the 1962 World Cup.
In england in 1966, he was targeted even more egregiously.
According to the team doctor, more players were injured in eight days than in the previous eight years. Fully expected back home to win the Jules rimet trophy for a third successive time, Brazil went out in the group stage. Again, a nation mourned, and for Pele ‘it was the saddest moment of my life’. he vowed that he would never play in the World Cup again.
happily, he changed his mind, and at 29, lit up the 1970 tournament, confounding all those who had declared him past his best. In part because of the advent of colour television, Mexico ’70 yielded what for many of us are the most enduringly vivid images of Pele: the picture of him embracing Bobby Moore after the 1-0 defeat of england, his perfectly-weighted pass into the path of Carlos Alberto in the final and, of course, his joy afterwards, clasping the trophy.
This fascinating film reminds us that he actually hit the target an outlandish 1,283 times in 1,367 games. It might also make you reappraise the stature of a man who in recent years seems to have slipped down the list, behind Messi, ronaldo and Maradona, when people consider: who was the greatest player of all time?