What Pele did not leave

Pelé died on December 29, 2022. Pelé lives, because certain champions have the ability to overcome the normal earthly duration, to always be able to remember the gift of current events, despite the fact that the football in which he played is now very different from the current one, despite other champions have followed him, perhaps even surpassed him, with the difference, unlike him, they have been videos and images and not mainly stories, oral tradition. The champions of a sport are judged from the field, but then, in spite of them, in spite of us, everyday life enters. And with it victories and failures that have nothing to do with sport. They always say that what a great athlete does off the playing field, whatever it is, shouldn’t count, then you always end up sticking your nose into it, especially your beak. Curiosity, especially the slightly morbid one, is always tried to be dismissed with indignation, only to then not be able to resist the charm of gossip, of surrounding news.

Pelé won a lot, from the three World Cups down, he scored a lot, he was the first footballer to be an idol in America too. And in those years, it was the mid-seventies, football – for them soccer, football is something else overseas – didn’t give a damn. Not about football, but about Pelé yes, because he was a bit like a Muhammad Ali, only that he didn’t punch, but kicked a ball and in doing so he was the best in the world, even if he was no longer a beginner. His name became a brand, his TV shows were highly sought after and therefore expensive. “In a few years you will be able to buy the Cosmos and we will see it on Forbes”, said Steve Ross, joking but not too much, future CEO of the publishing giant Warner Communications and at the time a key executive of the New York Cosmos, the team that had hired. There was another turnover than the current one, but even at the time football, at least in America, guaranteed good earnings.

It didn’t happen that way. Pelé really created his own brand, he invested, but he didn’t buy the Cosmos and it didn’t end up on Forbes. Of the luck that could have been there, it seems that there is nothing left. The debts remained, despite a capital of at least 4.4 million euros. “She was very sad, she didn’t have the ideal people or guidelines around her and she made bad decisions but now there is no point in regretting it, even if it is regrettable. Now my goal is to solve the problem,” his son Edinho told ESPN Brazil.

Ancient history that of the champions of the ball who squander everything. As old as football. Fred Dewhurst was one of the Invincibles, the band of unbeatable players who won the first two editions of the English First Division with the Preston North End FC shirt. He was a refined striker with a very precise shot, he scored 450 goals in 560 games. He came from a very wealthy family, he was a fan of canoeing and baseball, as well as women, poker and liquor. He almost bankrupted his family with exorbitant stakes and parties in the country estate based on cognac, champagne and cigars that he had brought directly from Central America. He died at the age of 31 in a hospice ravaged by alcohol and disinherited by his family.

It was perhaps the first. After him a long series.

That of Fred Dewhurst is a story that anticipates more than eighty years that of Garrincha, the phenomenal winger of Brazil world champion of 1958 and 1962, that of Pelé. Garrincha, like the Scottish striker, ended up badly alcoholic and penniless looking back on the past and what he had lost.

Pelé never ended up in the maze of misery, he created an empire, he found a way to destroy it, even without the complicity of addictions, addictions and stuff like that. Like Diego Armando Maradona, but differently from Diego Armando Maradona. Different, at times opposite, united by that bond with little sense and a lot of talk, which is then a clash of visions of life as well as football. Or Rei or Pibe? A question that has found a home in conversations for dozens and dozens of years, to which many have tried to give an answer, even if there was no unequivocal answer.

After the death of Diego Armando Maradona, his final home became a pilgrimage destination. Pelé’s villa on Pernambuco beach, in Guarujá, on the coast of São Paulo, will probably soon become so. A debt of about half a million reais, almost 100 thousand euros, weighs down on the house. Above all it is in a state of almost total abandonment. O Rei had retired to two rooms, Edinho’s idea is to renovate it, make it a museum, turn it into a sort of football amusement park. The alternative is to sell all remaining trophies and memorabilia. Some Pelé had already given them away.

Something similar had experienced Bjorn Borg. He too is a champion, he too is loved, idolized, rich and famous. His fall came before Pele’s. “It was easier to play tennis and beat Connors or McEnroe or Nastase than to learn how to handle yourself. I had the great gift of talent with rackets, I probably only had that.” Knowing how to do business on one’s own businesses is often a business.