Football has lost its king – Sport – Kommersant

Pele passed away on Thursday at the age of 83. And this is a loss that, apparently, no other can be compared with in sports. The Brazilian Pele, the only three-time world champion in football, will forever remain not just the actually officially recognized king of the main game of mankind, but for some reason the embodiment of all the best that it has in reality.

Pelé, who has been undergoing treatment for colon cancer since late last year, died in a Sao Paulo hospital a few days after her doctors admitted that chemotherapy had stopped working, amid acute heart and kidney failure. And very soon there was an impression that this news plunged into mourning not only Brazil, but at least half of the planet.

And all the leading publications on the planet, of course, published his detailed biography, from which it was impossible to throw out a single detail. Almost every one catches. A promise made in 1950, after the defeat of the Brazilians in the decisive match of the home world championship from the Uruguayans, to the crying father of a ten-year-old boy who had not yet received the familiar short nickname, but was called Edson Arantes do Nascimento: I will fix everything and bring Brazil this title. Barefoot childhood in the Sao Paulo suburb of Bauru, when the ball replaced a sock stuffed with rags. The inspiration that descended on the coach of the local children’s team, Valdemar de Brito, who dragged the young striker playing for him to try out in the famous Santos. And the insight that descended on the coach of the grand Brazilian championship Lulu, who decided to sign a contract with a 15-year-old guy and immediately entrust him with a place in the squad. A rapid leap from obscurity with an invitation a few months later to the Brazilian national team, rebuilt to re-assault the football peak. The meeting of its leaders with coach Vicente Feola before the third match of the group stage of the world championship in Sweden in 1958 against the USSR national team with a request similar to a demand to field a 17-year-old debutant, although he had recently healed a sore knee. A goal in the quarter-final with the Welsh, a hat-trick in the semi-final with the French and a brace in the final with the Swedes, which included a goal after an incredible trick of throwing the ball in the box over a defender.

Then – the transformation into a striker that differs more than fifty times a season and the leader of Santos, who takes prize after prize, with two consecutive victories in the Copa Libertadores, the main club competition in South America, and two consecutive victories in the same 1962 and 1963 in the Intercontinental cup over European Cup winners Benfica and AC Milan. Over the Lisbon team, insanely strong at the time, with a hat-trick in the final. And also – the second World Cup, in Chile. In 1962, Pele came to him already a favorite of the public, but he could not play two full matches, in the second, with the Czechoslovak national team, having earned a stupid injury. The Brazilian national team, however, reached the gold without him.

Then – another portion of sniper exploits in Santos, from which neither Real Madrid, nor Bayern, nor Milan, and the next world championship, in England, could lure him. Now it’s tragic. It was an era when rudeness in football, in which yellow cards had not yet been invented, was considered almost the norm, and already at the start of the tournament, the Bulgarians chose it as a weapon in the fight against the Brazilian. “Broken” by them, Pele missed the match with the Hungarians, and in the third game in the group, he was finished off by Juan Morais and referee George McCabe, who did not pay attention to the Portuguese defender, even when his “ward” could only move around the field on foot and noticeably limping. This time, the Brazilians did not succeed, and the 25-year-old Pele announced that the world championships would not see him again.

Then there was a sensational story about how a friendly match with his participation in Lagos forced two Nigerian armed groups to conclude a two-day truce, and the Mexican world championship in 1970, before which he nevertheless threw into the trash the words of four years ago, with a fantastic the performance of the Brazilian team, more beautiful and more powerful than which football, most likely, has never known. In it, Pele transformed from a knight of the front line into a playmaker, a conductor, but he still scored, including in the final with the Italians, bringing the number of goals at the world championships to a dozen.

And then there was a meeting of a man whose fame no longer knew any boundaries, who was adored by Nelson Mandela, and Mohammed Ali, and the Queen of England, and Andy Warhol, with Henry Kissinger: apart from him, hardly anyone could convince Pele to leave his homeland, Santos for the sake of the New York Cosmos and for the sake of promoting football in America, which has not been interested in it until now. Then there was suddenly, shortly after the arrival of the legend, the first football boom that arose in the United States, spectators filled the empty stadiums, stretching in a string, following the example of the Brazilian, to the opposite shore of the Atlantic Ocean, European superstars – Franz Beckenbauer, Johann Cruyff, Eusebio, Bobby Moore, George Best. Then there was Pele’s farewell match, comparable in excitement to the finals at the World Championships: in it, on October 1, 1977, he played half-time for Cosmos and Santos. And the next chapter of life, in which instead of football matches – cooperation with the UN, UNESCO, charitable foundations, business, television, even experiments in the field of composing music. Well, and, of course, endless events in the line of various football structures – football from his life still could not go anywhere. He got out of it only in recent years, when he had to wage the same hopeless struggle with a terrible disease, like the one that he waged in 1966 against the Bulgarian and Portuguese bone-breakers.

There was nothing strange in the fact that Pele’s departure provoked such a reaction. For all the time that mankind has existed, it has not come up with a more popular and important game than football. And for all the time that there is the most important game for mankind, the main events of which are watched by billions of pairs of eyes, no figure has appeared in it comparable in significance and recognition to Pele. It seems that they began to call him the king of football back in the 1960s, at the height of his playing career, and later this status was assigned to the Brazilian almost officially. And if the International Football Federation (FIFA) suddenly decided to make an entry on this score, for example, in its charter, no one would be especially surprised: after all, why not fix the obvious?

Although in fact it all seems like a real miracle. Almost half a century has passed since Pele ended his career. And over these almost half a century in football – in different countries, on different continents – they constantly flourished, matured, outstanding talents were born. Sometimes such, in relation to which the word “genius” sounded quite natural, without any exaggeration. But only two Argentines – Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi – managed to stand next to Pele in terms of depth and universality, or something, recognition. And that – with some reservations. In the case of Messi, that he had just pulled out a statement of his exclusivity, exclusivity with his teeth, leading his team to victory at the World Cup in Qatar in mid-December, and it will be necessary, apparently, to really evaluate the scale of his contribution later, when fresh emotions will evaporate. In the case of Maradona, it is about the fact that a trickster and a hooligan, constantly getting into scandals and boasting of friendship with dubious characters, nevertheless, whatever one may say, cannot be an ideal icon of the genre. Especially if you have to compete with someone who could not be imagined rejoicing at a goal scored by hand, with someone who did not complain about fouls, no matter how much pain they brought, and did not like taking penalties, because he considered it a kind of cheating, too easy a way to deliver the ball into the net.

Even more wonderful is that Pele’s right to be at the top of the hierarchy has passed the test of modernity with its habit of questioning any valor, no matter how indisputable it may seem. And he was in this sense an excellent target. Most of the football life was not caught on TV cameras. Approximately half of the Guinness records of 1279 goals entered in King are phantoms, which no one is able to confirm, you have to take the word of the author. There is not even a video of the most beautiful of them, according to Pele himself, in 1959 to Juventus. But no one succumbed to the temptation to present Pele as a myth about a king rather than a legitimate king.

Maybe because too many football legends who, thanks to the wealth of their own experience, had the right to judge who he was – Ferenc Puskas and Johan Cruyff, Bobby Charlton and Franz Beckenbauer, Tostao and Carlos Alberto – spoke about the uniqueness of the Brazilian, about how that he is outside of any classifications and ratings, about his “otherness”. Or maybe because even that rather modest set of videos that captured the full matches of Pele, or at least individual episodes of these matches, which history has preserved for us, is quite enough to believe in uniqueness and “out of place”.

The thing is, even they were special, not like the kings of other sports, usually fighting on the spot with some one “out of the world” quality. That era, which began after the transformation of Pele from a football player into an ambassador of football, presented on a silver platter, it seems, a very understandable analogy. There are computer simulation games in which players can be upgraded for money, improving various aspects – dribbling, shooting, speed, if desired, bringing everything to perfection, to the maximum. Pele, who knew how to get away from opponents with the help of both a thin stroke and pure speed, who knew how to take advantage of the grenadier defenders in the air due to flexibility and balance, who knew how to hit the goal from free kicks from any distance, who saw his partners with the back of his head and gave them impeccable passes in terms of accuracy without looking, blindly, he turned out to be such a player who had undergone an absolute upgrade, but only left virtual reality. He turned out to be a living embodiment of the dream of an ideal football player, a living embodiment of all the best that can be in a football creator, a football creator, a phenomenon that, alas, is unlikely to be repeated, even if royal features are visible in some geniuses of young generations.

Alexey Dospekhov