Brazil 2-0 USSR, 1958
The young Pelé knew how to make a first impression. He scored four goals on his unofficial debut for Santos. He scored one on his official club debut, his goal-tending victim very much looking at his fate through the prism of a glass half full, later making a business card announcing his status as the keeper who conceded Pelé’s first. He scored within minutes of coming on for his first Brazil cap. But the true harbinger came in Brazil’s third group game of the 1958 World Cup. Thought too callow by some of Brazil’s coaching staff, Pelé and Garrincha sat on the sidelines as they watched the team beat Austria and draw 0-0 with England, the latter the first time the Seleção had failed to score in a World Cup game. That relative failure was enough to force the hand of the coach, Vicente Feola. He threw in the inexperienced duo and after 40 seconds Garrincha hit a post. One minute later, so did Pelé. The woodwork wasn’t the only thing rattled: the USSR team, one of the pre-tournament favourites, were so discombobulated they shipped a goal to Vavá another 60 seconds later. “The greatest three minutes of football ever played,” said the L’Équipe journalist Gabriel Hanot, the founder of the European Cup. The most epochal, too, given what Pelé and Brazil would get up to during the next dozen years.
Brazil 5-2 Sweden, 1958
Pelé didn’t go on to win the 1958 World Cup for Brazil singlehanded – Vavá, Didi and Garrincha would have had something to say about that – but the legend has become fact, and it stands up well enough in its own right anyway. He scored the only goal of the quarters with a blistering chest-and-volley against Wales. He notched a hat-trick in the semis against France, the pick of the bunch a juggle-and-volley into the bottom corner. He scored two in the final against Sweden, including a precocious flick-and-volley over the confused head of Bengt Gustavsson. Had another shot not hit a post, he’d have been celebrating another hat-trick. The young man, overwhelmed at the final whistle, wept tears of joy. At 17 years and 249 days, he is still the youngest player to win a World Cup and to score in the final, 19-year-old Kylian Mbappé, France’s emerging hero of 2018, positively geriatric by comparison. He’s still the last man to score a hat-trick for Brazil at a finals, too.
Benfica 2-5 Santos, 1962
Pelé wasted no time in making a mark on the 1962 World Cup. In Brazil’s first game, against Mexico, taking a straight line between the point at which he took receipt of the ball and the goal, he beat six Mexicans plus the keeper before scoring, showcasing a combination of speed, power and skill that was so unusual back then. Sadly his groin gave way in the second match, against Czechoslovakia, and his tournament was over. But 1962 would still provide him with a career highlight. After the first leg of the Intercontinental Cup, his Santos side, the South American champions, held a slim 3-2 lead over their European counterparts, Eusébio’s Benfica. With the second leg in Lisbon, Benfica were confident of getting the job done and when Santos came to town they found banners proclaiming the hosts as “World champions!” (shades of Brazil’s hubris before the 1950 World Cup decider against Uruguay, a fiasco little Pelé would promise his distraught father to one day avenge), Fired up with pique, Pelé scored another big-game hat-trick, one a tap-in, the other two breathtaking slaloms of grace and pace, as Santos routed their hosts 5-2. Pelé would remember this performance as “the best game of my career” and “a piece of footballing art I’ll never forget”. Admittedly in his autobiography he laboured under the impression he’d scored four, but he’d more than earned the creative licence and the overall point stands.
Brazil 1-3 Portugal, 1966
… in which our hero was kicked around Goodison Park like an old sock. Pelé’s knee was mangled by the absurdly combative Portugal defender João Morais, the champions were out in the groups, and Pelé announced his retirement from the international game. “There is a new style of play coming into favour in Europe,” noted Brazil’s medical adviser, Dr Hilton Gosling. “I do not think it will give as much pleasure to the public as we have tried over the last eight years. It seems inevitable now that we shall have to put more emphasis on the physical side of the game and concentrate rather less on technique.” A career low, but what happened next wouldn’t be half the story without it.
Brazil 4-1 Italy, 1970
Pelé quickly recanted but was considered a busted flush going into Mexico 70. By the team coach João Saldanha, anyway. A former player turned journalist, Saldanha was a leftfield appointment and somewhat eccentric: he announced that Pelé was going blind and should be dropped, got into a row over selection with the country’s despotic president, Emilio Médici, and when criticised in the press by his predecessor, Dorival Yustrich, went looking for him in a hotel lobby armed with a loaded pistol. Saldanha, having pushed his luck in spectacular style, was quickly replaced by Mário Zagallo, Pelé was reinstated, and the rest – the near miss against Czechoslovakia from the halfway line, the embrace with Bobby Moore, the circumvention of Uruguay’s keeper, Ladislao Mazurkiewicz, in the semi – is elegant history. The pièce de resistance was, naturally, the final against Italy, the 5ft 8in Pelé leaping into the thin Azteca air to head the opening goal, then the greatest assist in history, a blind pass rolled into the path of the in-flight Carlos Alberto just so. The very moment that football exploded into a riot of brash technicolour and still the greatest World Cup moment of all. Brazil 4, New European Style 1.
New York Cosmos 2-1 Santos, 1977
… in which our hero goes to the land of opportunity, becomes the world’s first true global superstar, wins the 1977 NASL Championship for the New York Cosmos, preaches “love love love” live on ABC television after scoring a valedictory 30-yard free-kick against his old team in his final match, and hangs around Studio 54 in a white suit. All hail the King. Love, love, love.
