Brazil Legend Pele Dies Aged 82

 They had completed a NASA training program, and the result was football that seemed like a win for all of humanity, much like the moon landings the previous year.

This was the beauty that modernity might produce. Pele, who was 29 and playing in his fourth World Cup after practically being forced out of the previous one, was at the center of it all. Even in Brazil, there were concerns as rumors of his nearsightedness spread. And yet he accomplished something that no one else could have imagined.

It is remarkable how many of his career’s most memorable moments involved him failing to score: the dummy against Uruguay, the effort from the halfway line against Czechoslovakia, and the header saved by Gordon Banks. His claim that he scored 1279 goals in his career is accepted by the Guinness Book of Records, but it includes a lot of friendlies, some of which were genuinely competitive occasions and some of which were not. Even though he was extremely productive, what draws us to him is more a sense of inventiveness and grace, the idea that what he was producing was art.

And possibly because of that, Pele is also simple to mock. Anyone who was born after 1960 will have much easier access to memories of Diego Maradona performing remarkable feats. Question: Was Pele really that good? Or was it simply because traditional football wasn’t all that? In fact, Pele’s bicycle kick in the movie Escape to Victory might be the Brazilian legend’s most well-known goal in the UK.

Pele’s post-career marketing, sponsorships, and sense of himself as a global ambassador for, well, Pele (and what an extraordinary branding move it was by whichever of his childhood friends gave the young Edson Arantes de Nasciamento the moniker Pele, a word without a clear meaning), had a regrettable naffness.

His charisma came from the fact that he didn’t quite fit in there. This is why he was regarded as the greatest player of all time, at least until Maradona came along, despite the fact that he also won three World Cups, two Libertadores championships, numerous Paulista and Brazilian championships, and there are rumors that the Biafran War was put on hold so that both sides could watch him play.

Was he the best of all time? It’s a pointless question that encourages supporters of one candidate to point out flaws in the others. The fact that there are only truly two or three candidates among the players who have retired is far more pertinent.

There is Pele, there is Maradona, and perhaps there is Alfredo Di Stefano, but that counts against him because he has never participated in a World Cup (see: nit-picking is implicit in the question).

The bright future that the 1970 World Cup promised ultimately proved to be a mirage; it was Woodstock for football. It was the penultimate competition before pressing and systems football took over for good; it was not the beginning of a golden age of individual offensive brilliance. Instead, it was played in the heat and altitude of Mexico. Pele was the greatest icon of that era of football, but his intellect and athletic prowess were instrumental in bringing it into the contemporary day.

It doesn’t matter if he was the best or not. He was fantastic, and he was the best at what may have been the greatest World Cup ever—that beautiful window of opportunity in Mexico. He created the best that humanity is capable of during that month in 1970.