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      China’s Soccer Experiment Flopped. Now It May Be Over.

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      China poured billions into its bid to become a major player in the world’s most popular sport. A decade later, it has little to show for that investment.It takes only a glance at the news coverage from those days less than a decade ago, when China’s soccer success seemed only a matter of determination and money, to remember how quickly and how deeply the country embraced the world’s most popular sport as a national project.At home and abroad, China’s president, Xi Jinping, was pictured kicking soccer balls and watching youth matches. State media detailed his lifelong love of the game. Schools were ordered to introduce soccer into their curriculums, and billions of dollars were earmarked for the construction of tens of thousands of fields. Major companies rushed to invest in professional teams, both at home and abroad, then stocked them with imported players — whatever the cost.There was talk of bringing the World Cup to China. In Beijing, there was audacious talk of winning it.Now, though, China’s great soccer dream appears to be over.The expensive recruits have gone. Top teams have disappeared with alarming regularity. The national team shows little sign of improvement. And in perhaps the most direct sign of a failed policy, some of the top officials charged with leading China’s soccer revolution have been detained amid allegations of corruption.“The hopes were really high,” said Liu Dongfeng, a professor at the school of economics and management at the Shanghai University of Sport. “And that is also why the disappointment is so big.”“My biggest hope for Chinese soccer is that its teams become among the world’s best,” China’s leader, Xi Jinping, had declared in 2015.Pool photo by Michael SohnWhat derailed China’s soccer plan, when earlier state-backed bids to dominate Olympic sports had delivered regular glory and piles of medals? A global pandemic and an economic downturn didn’t help. Nor did the lack of truly world-class talents. Then there were the bad deals, the whispers of corruption and the nagging national inability to succeed in team sports. Whatever the reasons, the current malaise infecting Chinese soccer is a major reversal from the momentum that accompanied the release in 2015 of China’s 50-point plan for the sport.That program was packed with concrete targets and lofty goals. Perhaps the most eye-catching was a directive to include soccer in the national school curriculum — introducing it to tens of millions of children in a single stroke — and to set up 50,000 soccer schools in the country by 2025. Eager to support Xi’s ambitions, or perhaps just as eager to take advantage of a loosening of restrictions on the purchase of foreign assets, Chinese investors quickly opened a fire hose of money on the game.Riding the RocketBillions of dollars went to acquiring whole or partial stakes in European soccer teams. Chinese companies signed up as FIFA sponsors and put their names on the message boards and shirts of well-known clubs. At home, some of China’s richest people and companies invested in teams with an abandon that transformed the country’s top division, the Super League, into a major player in the global transfer market. Players who once would never have considered a career in China were suddenly racing there, lured by eye-popping salaries or eight-figure transfer fees that their European and South American clubs simply couldn’t afford to pass up.That sudden burst of spending spooked Chinese regulators, who belatedly imposed restraints on the industry to try to stop it from overheating. Yet even those moves failed to tame the worst excesses, and by the time the coronavirus pandemic descended in early 2020, and China retreated inside its borders, spectacular failures were common.Jiangsu Suning F.C., a team owned by one of China’s richest men, disappeared in early 2021, only months after winning the Super League title. Other teams followed suit; Guangzhou F.C. suffered the indignity of relegation after its big-spending owner, the property developer Evergrande, tumbled into its own financial crisis. Top players, complaining of unpaid salaries and broken promises, packed their bags, ended their contracts and headed home.An academy at Jiangsu Suning F.C. in 2021, weeks after the club, the reigning league champion, suddenly shut down.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“From the perspective of each team, if you look at cost and revenue, it was not sustainable at all,” Liu said.But China was in retreat on the international stage, too.Dashed HopesIf there were a single indicator of the high hopes, and supreme disappointment, of China’s soccer dream it might be its perpetually underachieving men’s national team, which currently sits below the likes of Oman, Uzbekistan and Gabon in FIFA’s global rankings, firmly entrenched among the mediocre and the afterthoughts.The team’s current ranking is almost exactly the same position it held when the panel chaired by Xi passed China’s heralded soccer reform plan eight years ago, and its most recent World Cup qualifying campaign was merely another humbling failure. China finished fifth out of six teams in its qualifying pool for last year’s tournament in Qatar, a defeat to Vietnam on Chinese New Year the nadir to a journey marked by repeated humiliations.Traditionally, China has enjoyed far more success in women’s soccer. It was an early pioneer in the women’s game, hosted FIFA’s first women’s world championship in 1991 and reached the final eight years later. But while China will make its third straight trip to the Women’s World Cup this year, it has not advanced past the quarterfinals since 1999 and will not be a pick of most experts to contend for the trophy.The men’s team’s future looks even less bright. “If anything, they’re only going to get worse the way things are right now,” said Mark Dreyer, the author of a book on China’s efforts to become a sporting superpower.China’s men’s team has never won a game or even scored a goal at the World Cup.Elias Rodriguez/Photosport, via Associated PressThe news is no better off the field. FIFA was forced to abandon its plan to hold the inaugural edition of an expanded World Cup for clubs in China after the country imposed some of the world’s strictest coronavirus restrictions. That event, unveiled at a triumphant news conference in Shanghai, will now be held in 2025, but it is unlikely to take place in China.Last year, the Asian soccer federation scrapped a multibillion-dollar television contract with a Chinese media company after it failed to fulfill its agreements. The Premier League did the same in 2020, tearing up a deal that was its most lucrative overseas contract, and has now signed one worth considerably less.The money that flowed from Chinese companies to foreign entities in the early years of the boom, and which quickly made China a major source of sponsorship income for teams, leagues and federations around the world, has been replaced by money from the Gulf, and particularly from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which now have the profile that China once sought.At a recent meeting of Asian soccer’s governing body, the Chinese candidate running for a seat on FIFA’s governing council finished last in the voting.Uncertain FutureAmong the many successes China once promised are some claims that cannot be verified. The official in charge of the schools project, for example, once claimed that 30,000 such academies had been opened, and that more than 55 million students were now playing soccer.“While most of the world celebrates a project once it is completed, in China they like to celebrate the announcement, throw out crazy numbers and then people accept that as given,” said Dreyer, who has spent more than a decade following the Chinese soccer industry.China invested in soccer schools and soccer fields but never created a pipeline of players.Gilles Sabrié for The New York TimesIt is unclear how many of the schools are actually functioning, and getting an answer may be all but impossible: The education ministry official who made the claims, Wang Dengfeng, was arrested in February.His detention was not the first, or the last. Li Tie, a former player who coached the national team during part of its failed World Cup campaign, was arrested over unspecified “serious violations of law” while attending a coaching seminar in November. Then, in February, the Communist Party’s antigraft watchdog issued a curt statement in which it said Chen Xuyuan, the president of the national soccer federation, was facing similar accusations.After Chen’s arrest, Hu Xijin, a nationalist and retired chief editor of The Global Times, a Communist Party tabloid, lamented the sorry state of the country’s soccer program on Chinese social media. Chinese soccer had burned copious amounts of cash and “completely humiliated the Chinese people” with its scandals, Hu said.Even before a series of government announcements noting that even more high-ranking soccer officials were under investigation, Hu suggested that Chinese men’s soccer was “rotten to the core.”His post went viral, with many commenters calling desperately for a complete overhaul of Chinese soccer. Whether the country, and particularly Xi and the rest of China’s leadership, will rally so publicly behind another effort is unclear.A previous anticorruption drive that included the jailing of soccer administrators and officials presaged the start of the latest efforts to grow the sport. The latest arrests and detentions, Liu said, might be a sign of the government’s willingness to persevere.Chen Xuyuan, the president of China’s soccer federation, in 2019. He is facing accusations of corruption.SNTV, via Associated PressThe former national team coach Li Tie faces similar accusations: “serious violations of law.”Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe director of China’s national sports agency, Gao Zhidan, appeared to suggest just that recently. At a press event after China’s annual legislative session on March 12, when soccer was conspicuous by its absence at a meeting on sports, Gao said he had been “deeply reflecting on the serious problems in the soccer industry” and declared that his agency would redouble its efforts at building competitive leagues and promoting young talent.What that will look like remains unclear. There is still no official start date for the new season, which is expected to be in April with a reduced number of teams. Among the casualties was Hebei, which not so long ago had lured Argentine stars like Javier Mascherano and Ezequiel Lavezzi, and Zibo Cuju, a team based in a city once recognized by FIFA as “the cradle of the earliest forms of football.”A downsized league will signal yet another rollback of Chinese grand ambitions, whenever it eventually begins. When will that be? No one is certain. An official announcement of the league format has yet to be made.Chang Che More

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      Investigators Clear Former U.S. Soccer Coach in 1992 Incident

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      An inquiry found no reason U.S. Soccer could not rehire Gregg Berhalter as coach of the men’s national team. But investigators criticized the parents of a player for their part in the controversy.Gregg Berhalter, the men’s national soccer team coach at last year’s World Cup, is eligible to return for the next World Cup cycle after investigators looking into his personal conduct cleared him to remain a candidate for the job, the U.S. Soccer Federation said on Monday.“There is no basis to conclude that employing Mr. Berhalter would create legal risks for an organization,” investigators said in a report made public on Monday.The federation three months ago hired investigators at the Atlanta-based law firm Alston & Bird to look into an incident involving Berhalter kicking his wife, Rosalind, in front of a bar when they were dating as students at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 1992. No police report was filed for that incident.The investigators said they were “impressed with Mr. Berhalter’s candor and demeanor” during the inquiry and found no discrepancies between Gregg and Rosalind Berhalter’s description of the incident, with Gregg Berhalter saying he reported it to his college coach and also sought counseling for the way he acted. The two had been drunk when they left the bar arguing, and Rosalind hit Gregg in the face. Gregg then pushed her down and kicked her twice in the upper leg, the report said.Both Berhalters, in a statement made public in January, acknowledged what happened and said they have been happily married for 25 years.The report also said, based on interviews and research, that there was no reason to believe that Berhalter — whose contract with U.S. Soccer expired at the end of 2022 — ever acted aggressively toward his wife in the past 31 years.“The investigation revealed no evidence to suggest that he had engaged in violence against another person at any time prior or thereafter,” the report said, calling the 1992 incident “an isolated event.”In a statement Monday, Gregg Berhalter said: “Rosalind and I respect the process that U.S. Soccer went through. We are grateful that it is concluded and look forward to what’s next.”The report concludes a bizarre turn of events surrounding the World Cup involving Claudio and Danielle Reyna, the parents of U.S. forward Gio Reyna. The Reynas complained to U.S. Soccer about Gio’s playing time in the tournament and suggested “they knew damaging information about Mr. Berhalter that U.S. Soccer officials did not know.”The Berhalters and Reynas had been close friends for decades, and Rosalind and Danielle had been college soccer teammates. But the Reynas became upset after hearing Berhalter’s public comments about an unnamed player at the World Cup who “was clearly not meeting expectations on and off the field” and who the staff considered sending home. The player was Gio Reyna, and the Reynas vented to U.S. Soccer about what Berhalter had said, with Danielle Reyna telling the federation about the 1992 incident.Berhalter coaching Gio Reyna during a match against the Netherlands in December.Danielle Parhizkaran/USA Today Sports, via ReutersThe Reynas told U.S. Soccer about the incident, the report said, because they didn’t want the federation to renew Berhalter’s contract. “The information was disclosed at a time when it would be expected to discourage or otherwise influence the organization from offering a contract extension to Mr. Berhalter,” the report said.The report said Danielle Reyna first denied to investigators that she told the U.S. Soccer sporting director Earnie Stewart about the kicking incident, but then called back to say she indeed had. Compared to how open and willing the Berhalters had been in the inquiry, the report said, the Reynas were much less cooperative.The Reynas could not immediately be reached for comment.The investigative report details some of the Reynas’ complaints to U.S. Soccer over the years, specifically calling out Claudio Reyna’s yearslong outreach to the federation on behalf of his children, especially Gio.Claudio Reyna expressed his dissatisfaction with refereeing at the youth club level of the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, travel arrangements at the U-17 World Cup (he wanted business class) and Gio’s playing time on the national team, according to the report. One person interviewed by investigators referred to Reyna’s interactions with U.S. Soccer about his sons as “inappropriate,” “bullying” and “mean spirited.” Another, whose name was also redacted, said, “Mr. Reyna expected Gio Reyna to be treated better than other players.”The report also said that the communications between the Reynas and U.S. Soccer didn’t violate any federation laws or policy, but it did not say whether the Reynas violated FIFA’s code of ethics.In a statement, U.S. Soccer noted that the report said that there is “a need to revisit U.S. Soccer’s policies concerning appropriate parental conduct and communications with the staff at the National Team level.”The federation went on to say: “We will be updating those policies as we continue to work to ensure safe environments for all participants in our game.”Whether Berhalter will be in charge of the men’s national team when those policies are put in place is still unknown.Stewart, the sporting director, resigned in January amid the Reyna-Berhalter situation and took a job with a Dutch club team, and U.S. Soccer is looking for his replacement. The new sporting director will likely will be in charge of hiring the new men’s national team coach. More

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      Former Fox Employee Convicted of Bribery for Soccer Broadcast Deals

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      The employee, Hernán López, and an Argentine marketing firm were accused of helping make illegal payments for rights to tournaments in South America.After hearing seven weeks of often-impenetrable testimony about television contracts, codes of ethics and the interpretation of Spanish phrases in emails sent more than a dozen years ago, a federal jury in Brooklyn on Thursday convicted a former Fox employee and an Argentine sports marketing firm of paying bribes in exchange for lucrative soccer broadcasting contracts.Prosecutors said that Hernán López, who until 2016 worked for a unit of what was then known as 21st Century Fox, had taken part in a complex scheme to make millions of dollars in secret annual payments to the presidents of national soccer federations in order to secure the rights to the Copa Libertadores and the Copa Sudamericana, widely viewed South American soccer tournaments. Full Play Group, the marketing firm, stood accused of similar but far more extensive corruption. Prosecutors said it paid bribes for the rights to World Cup qualifiers, exhibition matches, the Copa América tournament and the Copa Libertadores.The government also argued that López had taken advantage of “loyalty secured through the payment of bribes” to secure inside information that helped Fox beat out ESPN in its bid for the United States broadcasting rights for the 2018 and 2022 men’s World Cups — a theory Fox has vigorously denied. Fox was never accused of any wrongdoing.López, who holds dual American and Argentine citizenship, was convicted on one count of money laundering conspiracy and one count of wire fraud conspiracy and faces up to 40 years in prison. Full Play was convicted on six fraud and money laundering counts and, as a corporation, could face financial penalties.A third defendant, Carlos Martínez, who worked under López at Fox, was acquitted on counts of wire fraud conspiracy and money laundering conspiracy.The convictions represent what Breon S. Peace, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, called “a resounding victory” in the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of corruption in international soccer.After a secret inquiry began in 2010, the case broke into public view in May 2015 when sensational predawn arrests were made in Zurich, the city that FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, calls home. Since then, more than two dozen individuals and entities have voluntarily pleaded guilty to a wide variety of charges, including racketeering and wire fraud. And in 2017, a different federal jury convicted two soccer officials, from Paraguay and Brazil, on wire fraud conspiracy and other charges.Prosecutors indicted López, Martínez and Full Play in March 2020, signaling that the long-running case — which shook FIFA to the core and resulted in a shakeout of several generations of leadership in its ranks — still had legs.“The defendants cheated by bribing soccer officials to act in their own greedy interests rather than in the best interests of the sport,” Peace said in a statement following the verdict. Judge Pamela K. Chen rejected a request from prosecutors that López be taken immediately into custody, instead releasing him with tightened bond restrictions. A sentencing date has not been set.John Gleeson, a lawyer for López, said in a statement that “we are obviously disappointed with the jury’s verdict.”He continued, “The proceedings have involved both legal and factual errors, and we look forward to vindicating our client on appeal.” Lopez, who left Fox in early 2016, went on to found the podcasting company Wondery, which was sold to Amazon in 2020 in a deal that valued the company at a reported $300 million.Carlos Ortiz, a lawyer for Full Play, declined to comment. The company was founded by an Argentine father and son, Hugo and Mariano Jinkis, who were charged in 2015 but were not extradited. A lawyer for Hugo Jinkis said he could not immediately comment on the news.“We are very grateful for the jury’s service,” Steven McCool, Martínez’s lead lawyer, said in a brief call after the verdict. “Carlos received justice today and it was a long time coming.”A watch party in Los Angeles for the 2022 World Cup. Fox had the U.S. English-language rights for last year’s tournament in Qatar and the 2018 tournament in Russia.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesThursday’s verdict came on the fourth day of deliberations after a complex and slow-moving trial. Jurors were presented with reams of contracts, financial spreadsheets and bank transfer statements, as well as expert witnesses who debated whether a particular phrase meant “pay him less” or “pay it less.”At one point, early in the trial, Judge Chen admonished the lead prosecutor, Kaitlin T. Farrell, for reading entire emails about corporate issues into the official record, warning that she risked losing the jury’s attention.And as in the first trial in the case, the government relied particularly heavily on a single star witness: Alejandro Burzaco, the former chief executive of the Argentine sports marketing and TV production firm Torneos, who pleaded guilty in the case in 2015 and has been cooperating with the U.S. government since.Over 11 days of testimony, he described in painstaking and sometimes stultifying detail the esoteric series of shell companies and phony contracts that had been used to pay bribes to soccer officials through a joint venture owned by Torneos and 21st Century Fox. Although he personally arranged the payments, Burzaco said he had informed both López and Martínez about their existence and said that neither executive had done anything to halt them.Burzaco also detailed using a relationship cultivated through bribes paid to Julio Grondona — a FIFA vice president and a longtime president of Argentina’s soccer association who died in 2014 — to gain inside information that helped Fox win the U.S. English-language rights to the 2018 and 2022 World Cups. ESPN had long held that coveted property.Although bidding was supposed to have been blind, Burzaco said he had asked Grondona in late 2011 for help at López’s request. Burzaco testified that Grondona had “told me if Fox puts $400 million, they are going to award it to Fox — tell your friends.” Fox ultimately paid $425 million, and several years later obtained rights to the 2026 World Cup, to be held in the United States, Canada and Mexico.Over howls of protest from defense lawyers, prosecutors called the former ESPN president John Skipper to testify about the incident. “I was disappointed,” he said. “In fact, I was angry.”In a statement after the verdict, a Fox spokesman said, “This case does not involve Fox Corporation, and it was made clear that there was no connection to Fox’s successful World Cup bids.” The company has in the past noted that the unit where López and Martínez worked, Fox International Channels, was spun off in 2019 and that it was a different division, Fox Sports, that was charged with negotiating for those rights.Although both López and Martínez maintained their innocence, claiming they were never aware any bribes had been paid, Full Play took a decidedly different tack. Its lawyers readily admitted that the company had made regular payments to Latin American soccer officials but claimed that those payments had not been bribes but simply the standard way of doing business when it came to South American soccer.Ortiz, the lawyer for Full Play, said in his closing arguments late last week: “You can look at it and, say, hey, do I like this morally? Do I think this is appropriate?” But, he added, “all of these executives and officers acted in a manner and behaved and carried themselves in a manner that sent a clear, strong message that their receipts of payments were totally fine.” More

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      Just Fontaine, Record-Setting French Soccer Star, Dies at 89

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      His stellar career was cut short by injury, but he made his mark by scoring 13 goals at the 1958 World Cup.Just Fontaine, the French soccer star who scored a record 13 goals at the 1958 World Cup, died on Wednesday. He was 89.Fontaine’s former club Reims and the French soccer federation announced his death, but did not say where he died or cite a cause.Fontaine took six games to achieve his feat at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, when he was a last-minute inclusion on the French squad.Entering the tournament, Fontaine, a forward, was little known outside the French league. Yet he tormented opponents with his speed and finishing touch, even though had to borrow a pair of cleats after damaging his own boots in practice.Fontaine scored four goals in the third-place game against West Germany, and he could have had five if he had taken the penalty kick.In addition to his feats with the national team, Fontaine won the French league title four times, won the French Cup and reached the final of the 1959 European Cup during his career with Casablanca, Nice and Reims.The French soccer federation said there would be tributes to Fontaine across France this weekend, with a “minute of homage” that will also be observed on Wednesday before French Cup games at Toulouse, Marseille and Nantes.The highest scorer at a World Cup tournament is now acknowledged with the Golden Boot award. FIFA did not begin presenting that award until after Fontaine set the record.“Beating my record? I don’t think it can ever be done,” Fontaine told The Associated Press in a 2006 interview. “The person who wants to beat me has a massive task, doesn’t he? He has to score two goals per game over seven games.”Playing in the days when no substitutions were allowed, France lost in the semifinals, 5-2, to a Brazil team featuring the 17-year-old Pelé.The men’s record for most goals scored in a World Cup career is 16, by the Germany striker Miroslav Klose, who played in four tournaments. Fontaine, who broke the record of 11 goals scored by the Hungary striker Sandor Kocsis at the 1954 tournament, played in only one World Cup.The Brazil striker Marta has scored 17 goals in five Women’s World Cup tournaments.Fontaine scored 200 goals in 213 games, including 30 goals in 21 games for France. But his career was cut short when he was only 28.Renowned for his lightning pace and ruthless finishing, Fontaine suffered a serious leg fracture after a mistimed tackle in March 1960. He retired as a player just after his 29th birthday. He briefly coached France’s national team before going on to coach Luchon, Paris Saint-Germain, Toulouse and the Moroccan national team.Just Fontaine was born in Marrakesh, Morocco, on Aug. 18, 1933. Information on survivors was not immediately available. More

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      Pele’s Breakthrough Gave Soccer a Black Star

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      Pelé’s reign atop the most popular sport on earth began in an era defined by political struggles against colonialism and racial inequity around the world.Pelé’s graceful genius was just one part of what made him unforgettable.He was a dervish, a magician, an artist whose speedy precision, bullet drives and twirling bicycle kicks were brush strokes offering a challenge to the staid, stationary, and traditional standards of the game he came to dominate.The soccer field was his canvas, where he created masterpiece after masterpiece, starting at the very beginning of his career. In 1958, he was only 17 and just a few short years removed from learning soccer on the streets of an impoverished Brazilian favela that was his home. But at that year’s World Cup, he scored six goals, including three in the semifinals against France and two in a 5-2 win over Sweden, the home team, to clinch the championship.That’s the genius, precocious and pure.But the other part, what made Pelé the indelible gold standard of the global game, was timing. I do not mean the timing on the field that Pelé possessed — and did he ever. I mean how his rise lined up just right with changes in the world.After winning that 1958 World Cup, Pelé would quickly stride to the top of the most popular sport on earth and remain there for nearly 20 years, in an era defined by political struggles against colonialism and racial inequity around the world.The world changed in ways that lined up perfectly for Pelé, gilding his mystique, and TV was a prime mover.Think about when he emerged. He would solidify his status as the game’s greatest star, the first from the African diaspora to achieve such acclaim, in the 1960s, before topping off his career in the ’70s by pushing Brazil to a third World Cup title. He then attempted to capture the hearts of soccer-skeptical America by playing for the New York Cosmos. Television became ubiquitous, and so too did Pelé.Pelé drives past Antonio Girardo (6) of Napoli to score one of his two goals for Santos in an exhibition match on Randall’s Island in 1968.Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesGrace and genius and the luck of perfect timing. That’s Pelé.It was just a few short weeks ago, on Dec. 18, when we once again saw Pelé-style brilliance displayed at the World Cup. Argentina defeated the reigning champion, France, on the wind of penalty kicks. Lionel Messi and Kylian Mbappé conjured a final of such tension and quality that many called it the greatest World Cup game.It shredded nerves, brought tears of joy and pain in equal measure, and spawned a new round of arguments. Who is better — Messi or Mbappé? And more than that, with Messi finally fulfilling his World Cup dream, did he have a case as greatest soccer player of all time?Could the whirling Argentine be better than Pelé? Or had he not yet topped his countryman, Diego Maradona?That argument will not be solved here. It could go on until the end of time. But notice the throughline: Pelé is the ultimate measure.Only one player is held in such high regard that he is seen as the prime example of greatness by which all others should be compared. Sports evolve constantly, but evolution must begin somewhere.Pelé was soccer’s Big Bang. The great players of the present day, and of the future, will follow his lead.There is another, less talked about way that Pelé was unique. He was Black and he burst forward into the global consciousness when people of color around the world were clamoring anew against entrenched power. This cannot be overlooked.Nuance is needed here, for Pelé was famously — some would say infamously — agnostic regarding the great struggles of the day. He shared the same élan and mastery as another champion of the era, Muhammad Ali, yet he lacked Ali’s outspoken conviction.“Ultimately I don’t understand anything about politics,” he said in a 2021 documentary.Pelé shared the same élan and mastery as another champion of the era, Muhammad Ali, yet he lacked Ali’s outspoken conviction away from competition.Richard Drew/Associated PressOf course, he endured plenty of criticism for not standing up to the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil for roughly two decades, beginning in 1964 and lasting through Brazil’s victory in 1970.“A lot of people look less at what he did on the pitch, and more at what he did off of it,” said Paulo César Vasconcellos, a Brazilian journalist, in the documentary. “Off the pitch, he’s characterized by his political neutrality. At that moment in history, that worked against him.”But not every prominent athlete needs to be a firebrand. And it would be a mistake to cast judgment on Pelé while failing to recognize the deep history of Brazil and how its particular culture shaped and muted Black citizens for centuries.He was not Ali. Being Pelé was feat enough to push the world forward. A Black athlete who stirred a soul-deep passion in virtually every corner of the world. A Black athlete not just dominating, not just bringing a breathtaking aesthetic to the pitch, but becoming the mold by which all others are compared.Now we are on to the next.As fate would have it, in this year’s World Cup championship match defeat, France’s Mbappé netted a hat trick and won the Golden Boot award, recognizing him as the tournament’s top scorer. Black, lithe like Pelé, speedy like Pelé, possessing touch and alacrity and daring that feels oh-so-very-much like Pelé, Mbappé continues the evolution.In sports, greatness is transposed, and sometimes polished, player to player, era to era. And in soccer, each generational great, each Mbappé or Messi, each Marta or Abby Wambach, each Maradona or Cristiano Ronaldo, each graceful genius who will play the beautiful game of the future, comes created in the mold of Pelé, the one and only. 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 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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      81 Minutes in, Two Big Goals and One Big Rewrite

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      The Times’s chief soccer correspondent hoped for a “boring” World Cup final. He didn’t get one.DOHA, Qatar — Everything was going swimmingly, right up to the point that my editor — sitting to my left in the cavernous bowl of Lusail Stadium, a soccer arena so vast that the sound from the stand opposite ours seemed to arrive on a satellite delay — turned to me and threw seven casual, careless words out into the universe. “We kind of need France to score.”It’s hard to overstate the scale of a World Cup final. Every one is four years in the making. Every one sends millions of people to the streets in celebration, and millions more back to their homes in sorrow and regret. It is one of the most-watched events on the planet. It is, by some distance, the biggest occasion sport has to offer.So, as a journalist enjoying the honor of covering the 2022 World Cup final in Qatar, at least part of you hopes that it is intensely boring. Not devoid of action. Not the angst-ridden anticlimax that happens more often than not, in which both teams retreat into their shells, the pain of losing far more concerning than the euphoria of winning.No, the perfect World Cup final — as the person who has to have several hundred cogent words, spelled correctly, bound by what might pass as some sort of thematic thread, ready to publish as soon as the final whistle blows — is one in which one team has the game all but won with a quarter of an hour to spare.Which is, as it happens, exactly what we had on Sunday. It was at roughly that point when my editor, Andy Das, decided that what Argentina and France had offered so far wasn’t quite entertaining enough for him. He wanted, apparently, a little drama.There is just one aspect of being a sportswriter that seems to make my wife, children and relatives accept my entreaties that it is a proper job, rather than, and this is a direct quote from my wife, “talking to your friends all day” — the part in which you have to compress everything that happens in a game, all of the content and the context and the consequences, into about a thousand words.Oh, and you have to do it late at night. And within a few minutes, or at most an hour, of the game ending.The truth is, though, that most of the time there is nothing nerve-racking about writing live. I spent a rather pleasant portion of this spring in Madrid, watching Real Madrid stage a series of ridiculous comebacks on its way to the Champions League title. Each one was just a little more absurd than the last. One night, Real Madrid scored in the 90th and the 91st minutes, going from what would have been elimination to the most remarkable success, all in the blink of an eye.No problem: The more cinematic a game feels, the less thinking there is to do as a journalist. That’s part of the glory of sport. There are plenty of times when the story tells itself; we’re just there to transcribe it.World Cup finals are different. You never know how many you will have the chance to cover. And there was only ever going to be one chance to write about this World Cup final, Lionel Messi’s last shot at the ultimate prize, his opportunity to do what Diego Maradona did in 1986 and deliver the World Cup to Argentina.That is one you want to get right, and it is much easier to get right if you have at least a little time to think.Messi had done all he could: Argentina had established a two-goal lead at halftime and looked impressively serene for much of the second half. France seemed resigned to its fate. The shapes were starting to fall into place in my head: a portrait of Messi in those final few minutes, a man whose dream is about to come true. That could work.And then, well, Andy’s hope came to pass: Kylian Mbappé exploded Argentina’s advantage in two minutes. France might have won it inside 90 minutes; Argentina seemed to have won it in extra time. Then Mbappé intervened again. Both teams had glorious, glaring chances to claim the trophy in the last few seconds before the penalty shootout. But of course, only one did: Argentina.It feels like hyperbole — and maybe it is — but the final 40 minutes of the 2022 World Cup final, between Mbappé’s first goal and Gonzalo Montiel’s game-winning penalty shot, might be not only the greatest final in history but the best 40 minutes of soccer, too, the pinnacle of a sport that has become a cultural phenomenon.The write-up would have been easier had the game ended at 2-0, as it looked like it would for so long. Less stressful for me, less mind-blowing. It would not, though, have been nearly so much fun. More