Pelé This article is more than 1 year oldThe day I met a teenage Pelé, ‘the greatest advertisement Brazil ever had’
This article is more than 1 year oldA retired businessman recalls the time when, in 1958, the then-17-year-old World Cup footballer practised at his school
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Renato Carvalho was 11 years old when he met Pelé for the first and only time.
It was 1958 and he was a schoolboy in a small city called Poços de Caldas. To the amazement of him and his friends, the Brazilian team were preparing for the World Cup on his school pitch.
“Pelé was so thin, he was just a young boy of 17,” Carvalho recalled. “But I’ll never forget it.”
Pelé died on Thursday aged 82, 65 years after that skinny 17-year-old guided Brazil to their first World Cup title in Sweden. Pelé scored six goals in the quarter-final, semi-final and final, and set Brazil on a march that led to three World Cup wins in 12 years.
He remains the only player to hold three World Cup winner’s medals.
“Pelé was the greatest advertisement Brazil ever had,” Carvalho, now 76 and a retired businessman, said shortly after hearing that Pelé had died. “Brazil hit the headlines because of Pelé.
“It was Pelé, with his art and his football, who spread the name of Brazil around the world.”
The former Santos and New York Cosmos star died at São Paulo’s Alberto Einstein hospital at 3.27pm on Thursday, the consequence of what the hospital said was “multiple organ failure”.
He had been in and out of the hospital for more than a year, after doctors found a tumour in his colon. His body stopped responding to the treatment weeks ago but even though his death was expected, there was still a huge outpouring of goodwill.
The Brazilian government led the tributes, tweeting: “Football perfection; the King was almost synonymous with his homeland. Generations to come will remember him as a gentleman off the field, and a magician on it.”
Brazil’s incoming president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said he believed Pelé would join a heavenly kickabout with football greats such as Garrincha, Socrates and Maradona.
“Few Brazilians carried our country’s name so far,” Lula tweeted. “However different their language was to Portuguese, foreigners from all over the planet always found a way of pronouncing the magic word: ‘Pelé’.”
Carvalho agreed, remembering that Pelé’s victorious side, the team that won three out of four World Cups, put the country on the map. Before 1958, many people knew next to nothing about Brazil. After 1970, it was forever the nation of football.
“Brazil in 1958 hadn’t achieved the glory they achieved soon after,” Carvalho said. “There was no TV, we used to listen to games on a radio that stood on a stand in the corner. We had no idea who Pelé was or who he’d become.”
Carvalho’s memories of playtimes with legends remain vivid. He remembers Pelé as quiet; Gylmar, a brooding goalkeeper; Zagallo the wingback who would become the first man to win a World Cup as a player and manager, the latter when he coached his old pal Pelé to success in Mexico City in 1970.
“They trained taking penalties and we used to stand behind the goals,” Carvalho said. “There was a player called Mazzola and he had a powerful shot. We were terrified. They said that if Mazzola’s shot hit you, it would kill you, and so when he ran up to strike the ball we all lay on the ground because we didn’t want to die.”
Pelé was famously humble and many others have personal stories to tell. But Pelé’s time was long ago and football has changed. The sadness is real but most people believe there won’t be millions on the street to see his coffin go by, as happened when Diego Maradona died in Argentina in 2020.
“When Ayrton Senna died [in 1994] the whole world came to a halt,” said Donyy Alves, a 41-year-old receptionist. “That won’t happen with Pelé. Football is so corrupt that people just don’t believe in it any more. They don’t love the national team like they used to. They’re tired of it all.”
Carvalho agreed. “I think people will take his death more naturally,” he said. “Pelé’s success was a long time ago. People obviously know who he is but they don’t know him that well, so his death is a more natural thing.”
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