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      Days of Wins and Roses: Covering Pelé’s Cosmos

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      While the public saw one version of the Brazilian soccer legend in his three years in New York, covering the team offered an up-close look at the man.The private Pelé, the one even his most devoted fans never got to see, liked to sit in the back of the bus.When the New York Cosmos moved into the magnificent new Giants Stadium in New Jersey in 1977, it looked as though they, and soccer, had finally arrived. Before then, the Cosmos rarely attracted crowds larger than 15,000; in the 1977 season, they averaged more than twice that figure and three times surpassed 60,000.The sudden change could be credited to one man: the incomparable Pelé, who had come out of retirement three years earlier, at age 34, to join the Cosmos and try to turbocharge soccer’s popularity in the United States. Pelé’s personal charisma was amplified by the masterful publicity machinery of Warner Communications, the team’s owner. Supplementing its A-list soccer team with stars from its music and film labels, Warner made Cosmos games a hot ticket, feted Cosmos players at Studio 54 and — by footing the bill for a polyglot media horde — generated a whirl of publicity in every league city the team visited.On road trips in those days, the team bus shuttled players, coaches, trainers and reporters from the airport to the hotel to the stadium and back again. The Cosmos had a handful of other Brazilians, including Carlos Alberto, the captain of the 1970 World Cup winners, and on every trip they would sit together at the back of the bus, drumming and singing. Brazilians can create a samba beat anywhere, and the tray tables and armrests of the innumerable rented buses made fine tapping territory. And every time the music started, a quick glance over the shoulder would find Pelé sitting among his countrymen, smiling that broad, relaxed smile, drumming away.When he stepped off the bus, Pelé entered another world, one that required special handling. His teammate Franz Beckenbauer, the World Cup-winning German star, once said that he loved playing and living in New York because he could walk down Fifth Avenue and nobody recognized him. Pelé’s celebrity meant he enjoyed no such freedom.Pelé with fans in Washington in 1975. He and the Cosmos became a touring attraction.Associated PressHe had a bodyguard, Pedro Garay, virtually everywhere he went, as well as an entourage of personal assistants, marketing executives and friends. During practice sessions, this group would stand at the ready, prepared to fulfill any need, from booking a restaurant table to arranging a gift to delivering a message to his wife, Rosemeri, and their children.In rare moments of one-on-one conversation, Pelé seemed to prefer asking questions of his interviewer rather than talking about himself. In the chaos of the post-match locker room, where on any given day celebrity guests like Mick Jagger or Henry Kissinger might be circulating among the players, coaches and journalists, he would patiently answer a stream of questions until every reporter, every angle, was sated.In that pre-internet age, dozens of newspapers, TV and radio stations, magazines, and news agencies sent reporters to see Pelé, and the Cosmos, filling press boxes and changing rooms with a vibrant mix of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, French and assorted varieties of English.The locker room scene was new for Pelé. Before joining the Cosmos, he had answered reporters’ questions either in postgame news conferences or scheduled interviews. The rest of the soccer world did not — and still does not — follow the American custom of admitting reporters into the locker room immediately after games to get players’ reactions.But selling soccer in America required accommodations, and Pelé — the sport’s champion — took it all in stride. Serene as ever, he would sit in his locker stall, a hefty white towel around his waist, his gnarled and battered-looking feet wedged into shower shoes, answering in genial but broken English.Pelé always struggled with English. He tried, but it didn’t come easily. Quickly he learned to greet people he recognized as “my friend,” sometimes because he had forgotten the name, sometimes just to express kindness.When he had harsher feelings to express, his limited English often helped. To criticize the team’s tactics, lineup or other coaching decisions, he could vent to his longtime friend and interpreter Julio Mazzei, known as Professor Mazzei, who spoke fluent English and would relay the complaint. (The Cosmos eventually made Mazzei the team’s head coach.) And on the practice field, Pelé would yell, “Look! Look!” to point out a poorly placed pass, or, “Work! Work!” when he felt teammates weren’t giving enough effort.Pelé and his teammates with the 1977 North American Soccer League championship trophy, his only title with the team.Associated PressBy 1977, when other international stars had joined the team, a few jealousies flared, making for good gossip. But almost all of Pelé’s teammates, and especially his younger ones, loved him. Steve Hunt, a promising English wing, had just turned 21 when the Cosmos won the 1977 N.A.S.L. championship in Pelé’s final competitive game. Hunt scored the first goal and assisted on the winner in the Cosmos’ 2-1 victory. Afterward, in the giddy, champagne-drenched locker room, the young Hunt sobbed as he took the measure of his contribution, blurting, “I helped Pelé win his last championship.”Yet Pelé never exuded the celebrity self-involvement so typical of superstars. He would talk to children or ordinary people endlessly, often until his handlers had to physically pull him away. He exuded warmth and delighted in the kindness of small gestures.Not long after the Cosmos moved to Giants Stadium, in June 1977, I was at a weekday practice, working as a sportswriter for the New York Daily News. Several journalists and I were talking casually with Pelé, Mazzei and others when someone mentioned that it was my birthday. “Happy birthday, my friend,” Pelé said, smiling that famous smile.That evening, the doorbell rang at my Manhattan apartment. Outside was a delivery man with a huge bouquet of red roses. Tucked inside the bouquet was a small card. “Happy Birthday,” it read, “from Pelé.” More

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      When Pelé Took New York by Storm

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      In August 1967, it was hard to imagine that Americans might get interested in soccer. Then Pelé played at Yankee Stadium.It was August 1967. The Yankees were languishing near the bottom of the standings, their great years behind them. The Mets had not yet become the Miracle Mets. Still, it was hard to imagine then that a soccer player would capture a large measure of New York sports fans — if not the entire United States.But there he was, all of 5 feet 8 inches and 145 pounds. Pelé. We in the sportswriting business had heard of him, of course. He had led Brazil to two World Cup titles. We had even seen him play in New York the year before.But this was soccer. Although played in some neighborhoods of the Bronx, Queens or Brooklyn where immigrants brought it from home, it had not yet widely taken hold across the land.In the Sheraton-Atlantic Hotel, on Broadway and 34th Street, Pelé was holding a news conference. A day later, his team from Brazil, Santos, was to meet Inter of Milan at Yankee Stadium. A year earlier, Pelé had played in a boisterous match at Randalls Island, where fans ran from the stands onto the field to protest a referee’s call.Now, there were rumors that promoters were thinking of expanding soccer in the States by starting a league, and what better place to start, what better athlete to help jump-start it, than Pelé, known as the “Black Pearl”?A South American newspaper reporter asked the first question.“Honorable Sir,” he began.And I realized something different was happening here.“Honorable Sir”? I don’t think anyone addressed even Willie Mays as “Honorable Sir.” Obviously, this was not your typical American athlete. (Mays, by the way, was the highest paid baseball player at the time at $125,000 a year. Pelé was earning $200,000 for Santos).The foreign reporters continued to ask their questions, a beatific expression over their faces as they looked at this graciously smiling fellow who was deemed a national treasure by Brazil.That’s right, a national treasure, making him officially something like the Statue of Liberty. By Brazilian law, he could not be traded to another team out of the country.Everything about him was fascinating, starting with his name. A Brazilian reporter told me that in São Paulo they call street soccer “pelada”; he was such a symbol of the game that he got the nickname Pelé. (Pelé himself, though, offered several possible explanations for the nickname in his autobiography, but most probably it was a derivation of a player named Bilé whom he had admired as a boy.)Pelé, 26 at the time, seemed quite comfortable talking with the international press before appearing at America’s most famous stadium. He spoke about his far-flung business interests, his 7-month-old daughter.More than 15,000 tickets were sold in advance of the game. What would people see? What did this unassuming man do that would make Americans interested in soccer? There were clues. In his game the year before, when the second half began, fans ran onto the field. A woman kissed Pelé. Other fans fought with some of the players. It was a chaotic scene.Yet, as I watched, I understood how it came to be known as the beautiful game. And I recalled my first time with a soccer ball, at City College of New York. Like most New York kids, I had played baseball, stickball in the streets, basketball in the gyms and outside courts of the local schools.But when I started to kick the soccer ball, there was a freedom I felt that I hadn’t gotten even from baseball. And in soccer, you are always in the game. You are always moving. You never stop — well, almost never. The game goes on and on and you’re always in it.And now, all these years after college, as I watched Pelé at Yankee Stadium and listened to the full-throated fans hollering in Portuguese — there was a sizable Brazilian population in New York — I understood why Pelé had become a national treasure.He was injured near halftime when three Inter players surrounded him and one tripped him. Pelé sat out the second half.No matter. There were 37,063 fans at the game, then the third highest for a soccer match in the United States.Within a few years, big-league soccer came to America, and not just as a fad. And, of course, Pelé came with it, bringing his big smile, his incredible upside-down and backward kicks and his boyish enthusiasm for the sport.He showed Americans why soccer was the beautiful game. More

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      Pelé Was Brazil’s Ambassador to the World

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      In leading his national team to success on the field, a soccer star helped his country find itself.The young soccer players who were gathered on the lush green grass of the Rose Garden were buzzing even before the president of the United States took hold of the microphone. Even the president knew they had not come to see him.“Oh, by the way,” the president began, almost as an aside, “my name’s Ronald Reagan.” The Brazilian soccer star next to him needed no introduction.Everyone knew Pelé.He had met, by then, three American presidents, starting with Richard Nixon a decade earlier, and he would go on to meet several more. Each visit cemented the role of Pelé, who died on Thursday, as not just the world’s best soccer player, but as a living embodiment of his country. He was, for most of his 82 years, Brazil’s representative to the world and a source of pride to a nation that found itself, thanks in part to the magic in the feet of the 17-year-old wunderkind who fired it to its first World Cup championship in 1958.Brazil has identified with — and been identified with — Pelé ever since. It is hard to overstate the meaning of the connection between the individual and the country, a link that endured at his death almost as strongly as it did in Pelé’s heyday, when he was among the most famous people in the world. For a country still looking to make its mark in the postwar years, Pelé’s arrival signaled Brazil’s coming-of-age.When he arrived in Sweden for the 1958 World Cup, Pelé frequently recalled, he was surprised at how little people knew about the place that had produced him, a country he had believed to be the best in the world.That view was not widely shared in Brazil. The nation was burdened in those days with the so-called complexo de vira-lata, a term coined by the writer Nelson Rodrigues after Brazil’s humiliation on home soil in the final game of the 1950 World Cup. That defeat, Rodrigues wrote, exemplified a collective inferiority complex Brazil saw in itself, not just in soccer but in its relationship with the rest of the world.“Here is the truth,” Rodrigues wrote. “We can’t find personal or historical pretexts for self-esteem.”The same writer, however, said just before the team headed to Sweden eight years later that it had finally found in its young star a figure to lift spirits and to turn Brazil into a nation of which its citizens could finally be proud.“With Pelé on the team, and others like him, no one will go to Sweden with the souls of stray dogs,” Rodrigues wrote. “The others will tremble before us.” They did just that.That first world championship delivered to Brazil the type of recognition it craved, and in Pelé it found a talent whose brilliance set him, and the Brazilian people, apart. Brazil’s canary yellow shirts and Pelé’s dazzling play became synonymous with the country itself, its calling cards to the world.As Brazil won a second title in 1962, and a third in 1970, Pelé came to personify a period of sustained success on the soccer fields that was matched by an economic boom at home and the rise of bossa nova, a style of samba music from Rio de Janeiro that swept through the world like a current of electricity. Brazil’s confidence was sky high then, and in Pelé the nation had found “O Rei,” its king, a nickname that would be attached to Pelé until his last breath.In Brazil, Pelé’s feats, successes and celebrity meant so much more given where he had come from and — whether he embraced it or not — whom he represented.Brazil, in 1888, was the last Western country to abolish slavery, and Pelé was born just 52 years later, a poor Black child who started out life shining shoes.Pelé was the subject of a 2021 Netflix documentary.NetflixHis journey to national hero, after his explosion onto the global consciousness as a teenager, was particularly meaningful for Brazil’s Black population, and for its poor. His popularity also lifted him above the fray of domestic issues, soccer royalty in a nation still finding its way.Pelé, sometimes to the frustration of activists, rarely spoke out about racism during his playing career or afterward. He would often repeat the consensus view that Brazil was in fact a “racial democracy,” a position that has been challenged with the growth of the Black consciousness movement. His refusal to take political stands also stood out in a period when Brazil was ruled by a series of dictatorships, during which Brazil’s military sought to take advantage of soccer’s popularity to sustain its hold over the country.“I thought his behavior was that of a Black person who only said, ‘Yes sir,’ a Black person who is submissive, accepts everything,” Paulo Cézar Lima, a former teammate on the Brazilian national team, said in a 2021 Netflix documentary made with Pelé. “A single word would have meant so much in Brazil.”Yet to some of his other compatriots, Pelé’s very presence as a globally recognized Black Brazilian was enough. Taking on a dictatorship, after all, carried risks.Pelé’s legacy was sealed at the 1970 World Cup, a tournament in which he initially did not want to play. Brazil’s team, a double defending champion, had been eliminated in the group stage in the 1966 championship in England, with Pelé literally kicked out of the tournament by the roughhouse play of Brazil’s opponents. He was nearing 30 as the 1970 tournament neared, and he had said he had enough. Yet his country, and its military leaders, wanted him to go, and he finally buckled to the pressure and traveled to Mexico with a team few at home believed could win the title.That it did so, in stunning style and with Pelé at its heart, brought joy to a country then living through some of the darkest years of its modern history, a time when the government of Emílio Garrastazu Médici killed and disappeared scores of its opponents and tortured thousands more.“I am convinced that I helped Brazil a lot more with my football, with my way of being, than the politicians whose job it was to do this very thing,” a frail-looking Pelé told the Netflix filmmakers for the documentary released last year.As Pelé’s star rose, so did that of Brazilian soccer. His team, Santos, which had given Pelé his debut at 15, became a global force. With Pelé in its ranks, it was lured to Europe for monthslong tours, where it took on — and took apart — some of Europe’s biggest clubs. Those European teams quickly came to realize what Brazil was, Pelé would say. But he always came home.Pelé playing for his Brazilian club team, Santos, in 1968.Associated PressIn many ways, he didn’t have a choice. Such was Pelé’s importance to the state that in 1961 a declaration in Brazil proclaimed him a “national treasure,” a designation that meant he could not be transferred to any club outside Brazil. For more than a decade after that, the declaration kept him out of the clutches of rich foreign suitors.Even as he remained tied to Santos, though, Pelé’s fame was dovetailing with the start of modern sports sponsorship. His face adorned billboards throughout the country and beyond. His former teammates would remark that Pelé was almost as good at selling products as he was at playing soccer. He was finally able to capitalize on that fame when he moved to the United States in 1975: His three-year contract with New York Cosmos was worth $6 million, the equivalent of more than $34 million today.Pelé was 34 by the time he started playing in the United States, and by then he represented far more than what he had to offer on the soccer field. He was effectively Brazil’s ambassador to the entire world, a man who moved in the company of celebrities and presidents, a player who could pause a civil war and then shake hands with a queen.For Brazilians, those moments were a source of pride, each one a reminder of how a country in search of itself had finally found it through the medium of soccer, and through the brilliance of Pelé. More

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      Pelé, the Story in Pictures

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      He was born Edson Arantes do Nascimento in the tiny Brazilian village of Três Corações, where he played soccer barefoot, using rolled-up rags for a ball. How a young man from such humble beginnings became Pelé, widely considered the greatest soccer player ever, is a story written on the hearts of generations of his compatriots and fans around the world.It is a story told, too, in photographs that spanned decades — and that grew in luster and clarity as his legend did.Pelé, who died Thursday at 82, burst onto the world soccer scene as a skinny 17-year-old, scoring two goals in the 1958 World Cup final to lead Brazil to victory over Sweden. He would go on to score 1,283 goals in his 21-year career, leading Brazil to three World Cup championships and becoming recognizable worldwide for his unmatched skill and captivating smile.Pelé, second from left, scored Brazil’s third goal in its 5-2 victory over Sweden in the 1958 World Cup final in Stockholm. He was 17.Associated PressNear the end of his playing career, he helped popularize soccer in the United States as a member of the New York Cosmos, leading the team to a North American Soccer League championship when he was a wily 36-year-old. His style of play was so inventive that his passes often seemed to surprise his teammates.The origins and even the meaning of the name Pelé are lost to history. But in these images, his genius as a player and his indescribable appeal are frozen forever in time.— Mike WilsonFans of Santos, Pelé’s club team, mobbed him when Santos won the São Paulo championship in 1961.Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesPelé also played on military teams as a part of his mandatory military service.Pele10/Sport 10 IP Limited, via Getty ImagesPele10/Sport 10 IP Limited, via Getty ImagesPelé on the ball against Czechoslovakia during the 1962 World Cup. He got hurt and could not play in the final, but Brazil won anyway.Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesWhen Pelé, pictured in an undated photo, was injured in the group stage of the 1966 World Cup, Brazil failed to advance to the quarterfinals.Central Press/Getty ImagesPelé reveling after he scored his 1,000th goal in 1969.Associated PressHitting a bicycle kick in 1968.Associated PressPelé scored the first goal of Brazil’s four goals in the 1970 World Cup final against Italy in Mexico City.Rolls Press/Popperfot, via Getty ImagesPelé played at Randalls Island in New York as part of an exhibition between Santos and West Ham in September 1970.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesDuring the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, Pelé, who famously loved music, relaxed with his guitar.Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesPelé with the World Cup trophy at a parade in Paris in 1971. Brazil’s victory in 1970 gave it permanent possession of the Jules Rimet Trophy.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesPelé spent the last years of his career promoting soccer in the United States. In 1973, he visited students at a community college in St. Louis.Associated PressWith young fans in 1975.Associated PressPelé came out of retirement to play for the New York Cosmos. Associated PressPelé celebrated a goal for the Cosmos in 1975. Paul Hosefros/The New York TimesAt the White House with President Jimmy Carter in 1977.Associated PressPelé and Muhammad Ali, perhaps the two most famous sports stars of their time, embraced during a ceremony honoring Pelé at Giants Stadium.Associated PressPelé, carrying the flags of the United States and Brazil, was carried off the field after his final game in 1977. The Cosmos won 2-1 over Santos, with Pelé playing a half for each side.George Tiedemann/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images More

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      Pelé, the Global Face of Soccer, Dies at 82

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      Pelé, who was declared a national treasure in his native Brazil, achieved worldwide celebrity and helped popularize the sport in the United States.Pelé, one of soccer’s greatest players and a transformative figure in 20th-century sports who achieved a level of global celebrity few athletes have known, died on Thursday in São Paulo. He was 82.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his manager, Joe Fraga.A national hero in his native Brazil, Pelé was beloved around the world — by the very poor, among whom he was raised; the very rich, in whose circles he traveled; and just about everyone who ever saw him play.“Pelé is one of the few who contradicted my theory,” Andy Warhol once said. “Instead of 15 minutes of fame, he will have 15 centuries.”Celebrated for his peerless talent and originality on the field, Pelé (pronounced peh-LAY) also endeared himself to fans with his sunny personality and his belief in the power of soccer — football to most of the world — to connect people across dividing lines of race, class and nationality.He won three World Cup tournaments with Brazil and 10 league titles with Santos, his club team, as well as the 1977 North American Soccer League championship with the New York Cosmos. Having come out of retirement at 34, he spent three seasons with the Cosmos on a crusade to popularize soccer in the United States.Before his final game, in October 1977 at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., Pelé took the microphone on a podium at the center of the field, his father and Muhammad Ali beside him, and exhorted a crowd of more than 75,000.“Say with me three times now,” he declared, “for the kids: Love! Love! Love!”Born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pelé was a formative 20th-century sports figure who was revered as a national treasure in his native Brazil. He was known for popularizing soccer in the United States, and citing it as a tool for connecting people worldwide.Associated PressIn his 21-year career, Pelé — born Edson Arantes do Nascimento — scored 1,283 goals in 1,367 professional matches, including 77 goals for the Brazilian national team.Many of those goals became legendary, but Pelé’s influence on the sport went well beyond scoring. He helped create and promote what he later called “o jogo bonito” — the beautiful game — a style that valued clever ball control, inventive pinpoint passing and a voracious appetite for attacking. Pelé not only played it better than anyone; he also championed it around the world.Among his athletic assets was a remarkable center of gravity; as he ran, swerved, sprinted or backpedaled, his midriff seemed never to move, while his hips and his upper body swiveled around it.He could accelerate, decelerate or pivot in a flash. Off-balance or not, he could lash the ball accurately with either foot. Relatively small, at 5 feet 8 inches, he could nevertheless leap exceptionally high, often seeming to hang in the air to put power behind a header.Like other sports, soccer has evolved. Today, many of its stars can execute acrobatic shots or rapid-fire passing sequences. But in his day, Pelé’s playmaking and scoring skills were stunning.Early SuccessPelé sprang into the international limelight at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, a slight 17-year-old who as a boy had played soccer barefoot on the streets of his impoverished village using rolled-up rags for a ball. A star for Brazil, he scored six goals in the tournament, including three in a semifinal against France and two in the final, a 5-2 victory over Sweden. It was Brazil’s first of a record five World Cup trophies. Pelé also played on the Brazilian teams that won in 1962 and 1970. In the 1966 tournament, in England, he was brutally kicked in the early games and was finally sidelined by a Portuguese player’s tackle that would have earned an expulsion nowadays but drew nothing then.With Pelé essentially absent, Brazil was eliminated in the opening round. He was so disheartened that he announced he would retire from national team play.But he reconsidered and played on Brazil’s World Cup team in Mexico in 1970. That team is widely hailed as the best ever; its captain, Carlos Alberto, later joined Pelé on the Cosmos.“I wish he had gone on playing forever,” Clive Toye, a former president and general manager of the Cosmos, wrote in a 2006 memoir. “But then, so does everyone else who saw him play, and those football people who never saw him play are the unluckiest people in the world.”Pelé, right, hugging a teammate in 1958 after Brazil defeated Sweden 5-2 to win the World Cup.Associated Press/ReportagebildEdson Arantes do Nascimento was born on Oct. 23, 1940, in Três Corações, a tiny rural town in the state of Minas Gerais. His parents named him Edson in tribute to Thomas Edison. (Electricity had come to the town shortly before Pelé was born.) When he was about 7, he began shining shoes at the local railway station to supplement the family’s income.His father, a professional player whose career was cut short by injury, was nicknamed Dondinho.Brazilian soccer players often use a single name professionally, but even Pelé himself was unsure how he got his. He offered several possible derivations in “Pelé: The Autobiography” (2006, with Orlando Duarte and Alex Bellos).Most probably, he wrote, the nickname was a reference to a player on his father’s team whom he had admired and wanted to emulate as a boy. The player was known as Bilé (bee-LAY). Other boys teased Edson, calling him Bilé until it stuck.One of Pelé’s earliest memories was of seeing his father, while listening to the radio, cry when Brazil lost to Uruguay, 2-1, in the deciding match of the 1950 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro. The game is still remembered as a national calamity. Pelé recalled telling his father that he would one day grow up to win the World Cup for Brazil.He signed his first contract, with a junior team, when he was 14 and transferred to Santos at 15. He scored four goals in his first professional game, which Santos won, 7-1. He was only 16 when he made his debut for the national team in July 1957.A New Way to PlayWhen Brazil’s team went to the World Cup in Sweden the next summer, Pelé later said, he was so skinny that “quite a few people thought I was the mascot.”Once they saw him play, it was a different story. Reports of this precocious Brazilian teenager’s prowess raced around the world. One account told of how, against Wales in the quarterfinals, with his back to the goal, he received the ball on his chest, let it drop to an ankle and instantly scooped it around behind him. As it bounced, he turned — so quickly that the ball was barely a foot off the ground — and struck it into the net. It was his first World Cup goal and the game’s only one, and it put Brazil into the semifinals.“It boosted my confidence completely,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The world now knew about Pelé.”Pelé in his debut game in 1975 with the New York Cosmos at Randalls Island Stadium.Barton Silverman/The New York TimesThe world now knew about Brazilian soccer, too. Pelé undoubtedly benefited from playing alongside other remarkably gifted ball-control artists — Garrincha, Didi and Vavá among them — as well as from Europe’s lack of familiarity with the Brazilian style.Most European teams used static alignments; players seldom strayed from their designated areas.Brazil, though, encouraged two of the four midfielders to behave like wingers when attacking. This forced opponents to cope quickly with four forwards, rather than two. Making things more difficult, the forwards often switched sides, right and left, and the outside fullbacks sometimes joined the attack. The effect dazzled onlookers, not to mention opponents.After the semifinal against France, in which Pelé scored a hat trick in a 5-2 Brazil win, the French goalkeeper reportedly said, “I would rather play against 10 Germans than one Brazilian.”The team went home to national acclaim, and Pelé resumed playing for Santos as well as for two Army teams as part of his mandatory military service. In 1959 alone, he endured a relentless schedule of 103 competitive matches; nine times, he played two games within 24 hours.Santos began to capitalize on his fame with lucrative postseason tours. In 1960, en route to Egypt, the team’s plane stopped in Beirut, where a crowd gathered threatening to kidnap Pelé unless Santos agreed to play a Lebanese team.“Fortunately, the police dealt with it firmly, and we flew on to Egypt,” Pelé wrote in his autobiography.He had become such a hero that, in 1961, to ward off European teams eager to buy his contract rights, the Brazilian government passed a resolution declaring him a nonexportable national treasure.Soccer DiplomacyWhen Pelé was about to retire from Santos in the early 1970s, Henry A. Kissinger, the United States secretary of state at the time, wrote to the Brazilian government asking it to release Pelé to play in the United States as a way to help promote soccer, and Brazil, in America.By then, two more World Cups, numerous international club competitions and tireless touring by Santos had made Pelé a global celebrity. So it was beyond quixotic when Toye, the Cosmos general manager, decided to try to persuade the player universally acclaimed as the world’s best, and highest paid, to join his team.The Cosmos had been born only a month earlier, in one afternoon, when all the players had gathered in a hotel at Kennedy International Airport to sign an agreement to play for $75 a game in a country where soccer was a minor sport at best.Toye first met with Pelé and Julio Mazzei, Pelé’s longtime friend and mentor, in February 1971 during a Santos tour in Jamaica. It took dozens more conversations over the next four years, as well as millions of dollars from Warner Communications, the team’s owner, for Pelé to join the Cosmos.During that period, he became the top scorer in Brazil for the 11th time, Santos won the 10th league championship of his tenure, and Pelé took heavy criticism for retiring from the national team and refusing to play in the 1974 World Cup, in West Germany. Toye made his last pitch in March 1975 in Brussels. Pelé had retired from Santos the previous October, and two major clubs, Real Madrid of Spain and Juventus of Italy, were each offering a deal worth $15 million, Pelé later recalled.“Sign for them, and all you can win is a championship,” Toye said he told Pelé. “Sign for me, and you can win a country.”To further entice him, Warner added a music deal, a marketing deal guaranteeing him 50 percent of any licensing revenue involving his name, and a guarantee to hire his friend Mazzei as an assistant coach. Pelé signed a three-year contract worth, according to various estimates, $2.8 million to $7 million (the latter equivalent to about $40 million today). Clive Toye, the general manager of the Cosmos, with Pelé after the soccer star signed with the team in 1975.Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesHe was presented to the news media on June 11, 1975, at the “21” Club in New York. Pandemonium ensued: Fistfights broke out among photographers, and tables collapsed when people stood on them.The hubbub continued when Pelé played his first North American Soccer League game, on June 15 at Downing Stadium on Randalls Island in the East River. It was a decrepit home; workers hastily painted its dirt patches green because CBS had come to televise the big debut. More than 18,000 fans, triple the previous largest crowd, shouldered their way in to watch.At every road game during Pelé’s three North American seasons, the Cosmos attracted enormous crowds and a press contingent larger than that of any other New York team, with many journalists representing foreign networks, newspapers and news agencies. Movie and music stars — including Mick Jagger, Robert Redford and Rod Stewart — showed up for home games, lured by Warner executives’ enthusiasm for their hot new talent.The Cosmos moved to Giants Stadium in Pelé’s final season, 1977, and there, in the Meadowlands, reached the pinnacle of their — and the league’s — popularity. For a home playoff game on Aug. 14, a crowd of 77,691 exceeded not only expectations but also capacity, squeezing into a stadium of 76,000 seats.That season, the Cosmos had added two more global superstars, Franz Beckenbauer of West Germany and Carlos Alberto of Brazil. (Later, in 1979, the Los Angeles Aztecs lured a third, Johan Cruyff of the Netherlands, to the league.) Soccer seemed poised to enter the American mainstream.But as it turned out, professional soccer was not yet ready to blossom in America, not even after the Cosmos won the 1977 league championship, in Seattle, or after Pelé’s festive farewell game in October, when he led the “Love!” chant and played one half for the Cosmos and the other half for the visiting team, his beloved Santos.The league had expanded to 24 teams, from 18, and lacked the financial underpinnings to sustain that many games and that much travel. Nor could other teams match the Cosmos’s spending on top-quality players. The league went out of business after the 1984 season.But at the grass-roots level, and in schools and colleges, soccer did take off. In 1991, the United States women’s national team won the first women’s World Cup. (The United States has won it three times since.) In 2002, the men’s national team made it to the quarterfinals of the World Cup. And Major League Soccer has established itself as a sturdy successor to the N.A.S.L. (In 2011, the inaugural season of a new minor league with the N.A.S.L. name included a New York Cosmos team, of which Pelé was named honorary president.) In June 2014, the city of Santos opened a Pelé Museum just before the start of the World Cup, the first held in Brazil since 1950. In a video recorded for the occasion, Pelé said, “It’s a great joy to pass through this world and be able to leave, for future generations, some memories, and to leave a legacy for my country.”Advocate for EducationPelé met Rosemeri Cholbi when she was 14 and wooed her for almost eight years before they married early in 1966. They had three children — Kelly Cristina, Edson Cholbi and Jennifer — before divorcing in 1982.After his divorce, Pelé often appeared in the gossip pages, partying with film stars, musicians and models. He acted in several movies, including John Huston’s “Victory” (1981), with Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone.It also emerged that he had fathered two daughters out of wedlock. One, Sandra, whom he had refused to acknowledge, later sued for the right to use his surname. She wrote a book, “The Daughter the King Didn’t Want,” which he said greatly embarrassed him. She died of cancer in 2006.His son, nicknamed Edinho, was a professional goalkeeper for five years before an injury ended his career. He later went to prison on a drug-trafficking conviction.In 1994, Pelé married Assiria Seixas Lemos, a psychologist and Brazilian gospel singer; their twins, Joshua and Celeste, were born in 1996. They divorced in 2008. In his later years he dated a Brazilian businesswoman, Marcia Aoki, and he married her in 2016.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.His brother Jair Arantes do Nascimento, who was known as Zoca and also played for Santos, died in 2020.Children always responded warmly to Pelé, and he to them. Neither big nor intimidating, he had a wide, easy smile and a deep, reassuring voice.“I have never seen another human being who was so willing to take the extra second to embrace or encourage a child,” said Jim Trecker, a longtime soccer executive who was the Cosmos’ public relations director in the Pelé years.Pelé greeting children during the inauguration of a soccer pitch in Rio de Janeiro in 2014.Silvia Izquierdo/APPelé was sensitive about having dropped out of school (he later earned a high school diploma and a college degree while playing for Santos) and often lamented that so many young Brazilians remained poor and illiterate even as the country had begun to prosper.Indeed, the day he scored his 1,000th goal, in November 1969 at Maracanã stadium in Rio before more than 200,000 fans, Pelé was mobbed by reporters on the field and used their microphones to dedicate the goal to “the children.” Crying, he made an impromptu speech about the difficulties of Brazil’s children and the need to give them better educational opportunities.Many journalists interpreted the gesture as grandstanding, but for decades, as if to correct the record, he cited that speech and repeated the sentiment. In July 2007, at a promotional event in New York for a family literacy campaign, he said, “Today, the violence we see in Brazil, the corruption in Brazil, is causing big, big problems. Because, you see, for two generations, the children did not get enough education.”(On the subject of correcting the record, research for his 2006 biography turned up additional games played, and the authors concluded that the famous 1,000th goal was actually his 1,002nd.)In London during the 2012 Olympics, Pelé joined a so-called hunger summit meeting convened by the British prime minister at the time, David Cameron, whose stated goal was to reduce by 25 million the number of children stunted by malnutrition before the Rio Olympics in 2016.Business and MusicPelé’s own venture into government began in 1995, when he was appointed Brazil’s minister for sport by then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Pelé began a crusade to bring accountability to the business operations of Brazil’s professional teams, which were still run largely as gentlemen’s clubs, and to reform rules governing players’ contracts.In 1998, Pelé’s Law, as it was known, passed. It required clubs to incorporate as taxable for-profit corporations and to publish balance sheets. It required that players be 20 before signing a professional contract and gave them the right of free agency after two years (instead of after age 32).Many of the provisions were later weakened, and corruption continued, but Pelé said he took pride that the free agency clause had survived.Business deals gone awry plagued him throughout his life. He himself said he was often gullible, trusting friends who were less competent than they appeared. In 2001, a company he had helped found a decade earlier, Pelé Sports and Marketing, was accused of taking enormous loans to stage a charity game for Unicef and then not repaying the money when the game failed to happen. Pelé shut down the company; Unicef said there had been no wrongdoing on his part.While continuing to promote educational programs throughout his life, Pelé also pursued his musical avocation. He was never far from a guitar, and he carried a miniature tape recorder to capture tunes or lyrics as the mood struck him.He composed dozens of songs that were recorded by Brazilian pop stars, usually without his taking credit.Pelé relaxing during the World Cup in Mexico in 1970. Pursuing a musical avocation, he was never far from a guitar. Pictorial Parade/Archive Photos, via Getty Images“I didn’t want the public to make the comparison between Pelé the composer and Pelé the football player,” he told the British newspaper The Guardian in 2006. “That would have been a huge injustice. In football, my talent was a gift from God. Music was just for fun.”As he grew older, he often spoke of the difficulty of distinguishing between two personas: his real self, and the soccer superstar Pelé. He often referred to Pelé in the third person.“One of the ways I try to keep perspective on things,” he wrote in his autobiography, “is to remind myself that what people are responding to isn’t me, necessarily; it’s this mythical figure that Pelé has become.”His face remained familiar around the world long after his retirement from soccer. In 1994, when the World Cup was about to be played in the United States, Pelé sat in Central Park in New York waiting to be interviewed for ABC News. A teenager passed, did a double-take and then ran off; within minutes, people were streaming across the park to see him.“There were hundreds of them,” Toye wrote in his own memoir. “Seventeen years after he last kicked a ball, this dark-skinned man is sitting in deep, dark shade under the trees — but he is still recognized, and once recognized, never alone in any country on earth.” More

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      Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert Talks, Criticism, Covid and Donovan Mitchell

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      Gobert had a dominant run in Utah, but now he and the Minnesota Timberwolves are struggling to find their fit together. He hears the chatter — and ignores it.Rudy Gobert, the Minnesota Timberwolves center and French basketball star, rode the same wave of emotions as many of his French compatriots during the men’s World Cup final this month. Angst. Hope. Agony.When it ended, with France losing to Argentina in penalty kicks, he reached out to his friend, the 24-year-old French star Kylian Mbappé, who had scored three goals in the championship match.“I was really proud of him,” Gobert said. “He showed the world who he is. He’s only getting better and better. That’s what I told him.”Gobert thought Mbappé must have felt like he did after he lost to Spain in the EuroBasket final with the French national team three months ago.“Obviously, it’s not as watched as the soccer World Cup, but it’s the same feeling when you lose, when you’re so close to being on top and lose in the final,” Gobert said. “So just got to use that pain to just keep getting better.”Gobert, a three-time N.B.A. defensive player of the year, has been going through a challenging period of his own.This summer, the Utah Jazz traded him to Minnesota, which bet its future on Gobert’s ability to help the franchise win its first championship. The Timberwolves gave the Jazz four draft picks, four players and the right to swap picks in 2026.“The average fan might not understand what I bring to the table,” Gobert said, “but the G.M.s in the league do.”In Minnesota, Gobert joined his fellow big man Karl-Anthony Towns, and the team has struggled to adjust to its new makeup. The Timberwolves went on a five-game winning streak in November, but Towns has been out since he hurt his calf Nov. 28 and Gobert has missed a few games. Minnesota was 16-18 entering Wednesday’s game against New Orleans.Gobert recently sat down with The New York Times to discuss his transition to Minnesota; how he handles criticism; racism in Utah; and his relationship with his former Jazz teammate Donovan Mitchell, who was traded to Cleveland in September.This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.Gobert’s scoring is down this season, to 13.9 points per game from 15.6 per game last season in Utah.Chris Szagola/Associated PressWhat has it been like adjusting to playing with another center like Karl-Anthony Towns?I don’t really like to call him a center because I don’t think he’s a center. I think it’s more of a wing in a center’s body. But yeah, it’s been a fun process so far. Obviously, we knew there was going to be some ups and downs, and there is some ups and downs. But KAT has been a great teammate. He’s been a great human.People like to focus on the fact that it’s two big men that play together, but there is always a process of adjustment when a player like me joins another team. Building chemistry takes time.Is it hard when you’re going through that process and there are so many eyes on how it’s going?It’s not hard for me. I want to win, I’m a competitor, so it’s hard to lose. But at the same time, I’m able to understand the bigger picture and to understand that you got to go through pain to grow. I’ve said every time people ask me, it’s going to be some adversity. And when adversity hits, obviously everybody will have something to say. People are always going to have opinions.A lot of people celebrate my failures. It’s kind of like a mark of respect for me just to have people that just wait until I do something wrong or until my teams start losing. Then they become really, really loud. And when my teams do well it’s quiet again. You know, I kind of embrace that it’s part of the external noise that comes with all the success that we’ve had in Utah and over the last few years in my career.When did you first feel that people were celebrating your failures?Once I started to have success, when I started winning defensive player of the year, All-N.B.A., being an All-Star. When my team, when we started winning like 50 games and stuff. The people on social media are always the loudest. When I go outside, it’s usually all the interactions are positive.Social media is a different place, and the people that have a lot of frustration can put it out there. The fans are going to have opinions. I’m more talking about the media.A lot of people talk about Utah as being a difficult place for Black players, for Black people in general. Did you ever have experiences like that as a Black player when you were there?My family and I never had any bad experiences. I’ve always had a lot of love over there. But I can understand, for me being an N.B.A. player and for a young Black man that’s maybe the only Black guy in his school, treatment can be different. People talk about Utah, but it’s similar everywhere when there’s not a lot of diversity. It’s part of every society in the world that people that can be marginalized for being different color of skin, different religion. There’s always going to be kids at school that’s going to bully people for being different.Gobert has won three Defensive Player of the Year Awards.Alika Jenner/Getty ImagesYou went through a very strange experience a couple of years ago in Utah as the first N.B.A. player known to have tested positive for the coronavirus. You were blamed for spreading it within the league, even though no one really knew how it happened. How did that experience affect you?It was a really tough experience for me, dealing with all that, obviously, Covid, but also everything that came with it. Thanks to — yeah, it was a tough experience, but I think it made me grow.Did you say ‘thanks to media’?No, I stopped saying what I was going to say. But I remember a lot of things that happened. I won’t forget, you know. There was a lot of fear. There was a lot of narratives out there. I was a victim of that. But at the same time, a lot of people were going through some really tough moments. I had to get away from what people are saying about me. It was people that don’t even know me. And I know that when you have something like that that’s happening, people are really stressed out and it was tough for everyone.There was a lot of conversation about your relationship with Donovan Mitchell, at that time and afterward. How do you view how that relationship was?I think it was a tough situation for me, just like it was a tough situation for him. After that, we came back to have a lot of success as a team. As of today, Donovan is someone that I want to see him happy. I want to see him succeed. I want him and his family to be great. Things happen, and sometimes people can do things to you that can hurt you. A lot of times it’s out of fear, you know. So you just have to grow through that and see past that.You mentioned people will do things that hurt you. Do you mean Mitchell?I mean generally. That’s life. More

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      Far From the World Cup, the Essence of Argentine Soccer Expands its Reach

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      BUENOS AIRES — The essence of Argentine soccer can be found late at night, in the circuit of games in barrios outside Buenos Aires.There, young players for generations have cut their teeth, maybe dreaming of suiting up for the country’s national team, but primarily entertaining late-night and early-morning crowds with an intense, wild talent for the game, playing on whatever patch of ground.“Potrero” is the term that sums up this system and style, rooted in the informal and improvised games born in the earthy, amateur fields of the 19th century, long before soccer became a profession with billion-dollar clubs and multimillion-dollar salaries. Every Argentine legend has had it in his blood: Alfredo Di Stéfano, Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi. They all kicked around in potreros, and when someone dribbles impressively or scores an amazing goal, it’s common for people to say, “That’s potrero.”Franco Roldán, 26, said playing potrero helped him sustain his family while he was unemployed.Alan Matijasevic, 29, plays for El Ciclón de Burzaco, which offers soccer for people anywhere from age 5 to 80. His son Gio, 7, is a in a recreational program.Now, the games have taken a modern twist.Today’s young players have expanded the reach of their circuit by streaming the games, and Argentina’s win in the World Cup final this month in Qatar could bring them even more attention.Even before then, by word of mouth, WhatsApp and Instagram, interest in the circuit’s games had mushroomed from only a few dozen followers before the coronavirus pandemic — mostly coming from the teams’ neighborhoods in the cities ringing Buenos Aires — to thousands of people connected across the country and beyond. Last June, even a Mexican soccer fan page shared a video of La Sub 21, a respected potrero team, and the clip reached 4.4 million views.There are now some accounts, like Potrero Nato or Corta y al pie, dedicated to showing the best of potrero.Roldán hangs up his football jerseys in his house’s courtyard. He is one of the emblematic players of the “la sub 21” team,a potrero team.Villa Jardin where Roldán lives. In Argentina, soccer was learned and developed popularly in free spaces or parks, called “potreros”, without any institutional supervision or preparation for its practice.Roldán with his son before a match.Matijasevic trying to win the ball back during his match.Roldán and the players of La Sub 21 team talk and rest after a Friday night match.La Sub 21, El Ciclón de Burzaco and other teams sell hundreds of their uniforms every time they release a new one. Potrero jerseys are increasingly visible on Buenos Aires buses and subways.“Some people write us on social media asking us to play in Patagonia or Córdoba province, but we can’t afford the transportation,” said Franco Roldán, 26, who is known as Franquito and plays for La Sub 21.While he was unemployed, playing for the club helped sustain his family.“During the time I had no job, I knew if my team won games I could buy milk for my son,” Roldán, who has a 1-year-old, said.As a teenager, he played for Atlanta, a traditional second division team. But the club didn’t offer him a professional contract when he turned 18 and Roldán had to quit the dream.For Alan Matijasevic, 29, and many of his neighbors from Burzaco, a Buenos Aires suburb, El Ciclón is the barrio’s heart. The club was founded by a group of families in 1989 and ever since has offered recreational soccer for everyone 5 to 80 years old, including Matijasevic’s 7-year-old son Gio.The “family vibe” of potrero is what keeps Matijasevic playing, he said, even after 24-hour days.It is common to see children playing on the field during halftimes, even in early morning hours.The potrero system works like this: Teams arrange a five-on-five match, compete for a pot, typically around $1,000 put up by the players or sponsors, and the winner takes all. In general, a team organizes a potrero night, which features four or five games starting at 11 p.m. and finishing around 4 a.m. or 5 a.m. Over time, the players have gotten to know each other and many of them might play for a different team every week, depending on which club is short a player.The games never seem to lack an audience and it is common to see children, even toddlers, playing on the field during halftime of a match, even in early morning hours. The potrero games have become an hourslong social event.A recent potrero match for Matijasevic started at 7 a.m. and, by the time all the games and cleanup finished, 24 hours had passed.Susana Andrade Acuña, the ticket seller at every El Ciclón de Burzaco event, has watched players grow up.Veronica Gonzalez and Juan Paz working the bar.Many fans and spectators line the edge of the fields during the match.“Our club is like a family and I know some of the players since they were shorter than the table I sit at,’’ she said.Roldán performance in potrero clubs got the interest of the futsal division of Huracán, a premier Argentina soccer club that hired him in January.Jeremías Píriz, 26, said participating in potrero soccer gave him stability after a trying time in his life.He played potrero while training for a first division team’s junior squad to get extra money. But in 2019 the club dismissed him for showing up late after potrero games and some months later his 12-year-old brother died of a heart attack.“It was the end for me. I didn’t want to have nothing to do with anything,” Píriz said.After hardly doing anything for months, he started running and training again and found his way back to potrero.“I came back and found a lot of people happy just to see me on the field,” he said. “That was a relief and I promised my brother I’d keep playing for him.”Teams and players have increased their followings through social media.Recently, the first women’s teams have begun competing in the potrero circuit, including Las Ñeris, Las Flores and Chingolo.In the end, that “family vibe,” Matijasevic said, is what, after 24 hours in the club, keeps him playing.Last summer, he recalled, he was away on vacation in a distant province and coming out of a river with his Ciclón de Burzaco jersey on.Suddenly someone shouted at him: ‘Hey, El Ciclón de Burzaco!”Locals recognized him as a player and asked him for a picture.“I was touched and proud of how far our work has gone,” he said. “My club is the best place to refresh my mind and my barrio is the place where I love living.”The night ends at around 5:30 a.m., when the sun is starting to rise. More

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      Soccer Star Says His Family Stopped From Leaving Iran for Supporting Protests

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      Ali Daei, a prominent former soccer player, said his wife and daughter were prevented from leaving Iran on Monday after their plane made an unannounced stopover en route to Dubai.DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A prominent former soccer player in Iran who has expressed support for anti-government protests said his wife and daughter were prevented from leaving the country on Monday after their plane made an unannounced stopover en route to Dubai.Ali Daei, who had his own passport briefly confiscated earlier this year, said his wife and daughter had departed from the capital, Tehran, legally before the flight made an unannounced stop on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf, where they were questioned by Iranian authorities.He said his daughter had been released but the doors to the flight were closed by then. He said his family had planned to travel to Dubai and return next week.The flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed Mahan Air Flight W563 being diverted to Kish Island, part of Iran, before traveling onward to Dubai a couple hours later.There was no comment from the airline or Iranian authorities.The semiofficial Tasnim news agency, believed to be close to the Revolutionary Guards, said a travel ban had been imposed on Mr. Daei’s wife earlier this month because of her support for the protests. It said she had tried to illegally bypass the ban, without elaborating, and that her final destination was the United States.Mr. Daei is one of several Iranian celebrities who have come out in support of the protests, which were set off by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September. The Kurdish woman died after being arrested by Iran’s morality police in Tehran for allegedly violating the country’s strict dress code for women.The protests rapidly spread across the country and escalated into calls for the overthrow of the theocracy established after the 1979 revolution, making it one of the biggest challenges to clerical rule in over four decades.At least 507 protesters have been killed and more than 18,500 people have been arrested, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group that has closely monitored the unrest. Iranian authorities have not released figures for those killed or arrested.Iran has also executed some protesters, including a 23-year-old man who was publicly hanged earlier this month.Before his passport was confiscated, Mr. Daei, a top international goal scorer and former Iranian team captain, had urged the government on social media to “solve the problems of the Iranian people rather than using repression, violence and arrests.” More