Why Soccer Matters

by Pelé

  Meanwhile, the rules and regulations—and in some cases, the lack thereof—stripped the players of even their most basic rights. There were no retirement plans, medical help or insurance for Brazilian players. Players also didn’t have the right to become “free agents” after their contract with a club was up. If a player couldn’t reach a deal with their current team, then their team could forbid them from playing anywhere else. It was almost like human bondage. While a handful of Brazilian stars playing in Europe earned big salaries, most of the players back in Brazil barely got enough money to make a living.

  I knew from my travels that Brazil wasn’t alone in facing these problems. By the 1990s, soccer leagues in Britain and parts of Europe and the Middle East were also struggling with low attendance. Hooliganism, which some believed sprang from the lawless, rootless culture that took hold in the sixties and seventies, scared off thousands of fans. Meanwhile, the governing bodies that oversaw soccer had perhaps become too powerful. All the money and prestige that entered our beautiful game in the seventies and eighties had suddenly given the presidents and officials at national and global soccer federations a tremendous amount of clout and prestige, but no one had implemented any rules or laws to keep up with the new reality and ensure that they used all this power fairly—and without corruption.

  Indeed, for many years, I had been bothered by the way money just seemed to bleed out of soccer. I remembered all those games I played with Santos, all those foreign tours we took to Europe and Africa and the United States, and how the club itself mysteriously never seemed to get any richer. Our training facilities and locker rooms were not top-notch, to say the least. One year, after our usual trip to Europe to play games, a suitcase of money with the team’s earnings simply vanished. One of the team officials got off the plane to have a coffee and he said somebody took the suitcase from him. It was like something out of Mission: Impossible! Ah, we laugh about it now but these things were actually very sad.

  The problem with free agency bothered me so much that I’d been talking to our politicians about it since the early 1970s. I and a group of Santos players flew to Brasilia to meet with President Médici about the issue following an incident on our team. One of our teammates had dated the daughter of one of the team’s board members. When they had an argument, the board member insisted the player be removed from the roster—and sure enough, he was fired, and was forbidden from signing with any other teams, either. Labor laws protected virtually every other profession in Brazil from this kind of treatment, but soccer players were treated like third-class citizens.

  President Médici seemed sympathetic, but he ended up doing the easy thing: nothing. Now that I was sports minister, I was determined to address the issue. I proposed a whole set of reforms that had the goal of helping both Brazilian players and the teams themselves. Not only would we give players the right to be free agents, but we’d also pass a law obligating soccer clubs to produce annual audited financial reports. This would presumably result in a lot fewer vanished suitcases.

  Free agency was clearly an idea whose time had come. But on that second point, regarding financial transparency, I was much less lucky. Virtually every soccer club in the country rebelled against the proposal, because their managers knew it would mean the loss of their special privileges. They even set up a lobby group with an office in Brasilia whose job was to push against the legislation full-time. Meanwhile, there were allegations of corruption at the ministry and I had to fire fourteen people. Every day, there were articles in the press disparaging me for trying to destroy Brazilian soccer, when I was obviously trying to do the opposite.

  In 1998, a bill finally did pass—they called it the “Pelé Law.” But it was stripped of almost everything but the change to allow free agency, so I’m not even sure in retrospect if it deserves my name.

  Getting vilified in the press every day wasn’t something I was accustomed to. It was no fun—that’s for sure. I was only trying to make soccer as good as it could be. I was trying to make the profession worthy of the game itself. All these years later, it still hasn’t happened. Many clubs are struggling with huge debts, and the players are still fighting to earn a good living. Elsewhere in the world, many of the leagues that were in trouble in the 1990s are now doing somewhat better, thanks to better security and more professional management. It’s a shame that my country remains stuck in so many ways. Brazilian soccer, and fans of Brazilian soccer, deserve better.

  6

  Fernando Henrique’s successor was Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, another guy who kind of broke the mold for what Brazilian presidents were supposed to be like. One of twenty-three children born to a man in the northeast, Lula and his family migrated to São Paulo in the back of a truck when he was just a kid. He was the first person from Brazil’s working class to become president and, like me, he had done a lot of things with his life despite having very little formal education. He was an inspirational figure to many people not just in Brazil, but around the world.

  Lula could be very funny, and very charming. He was a huge soccer fan—and he was elected right after Brazil won its record fifth World Cup, in 2002. But his favorite team was Corinthians, which as I’ve said, I seemed to always play very well against for some reason. The first couple of times I met Lula, he would laugh and say: “Ahhhhh, Pelé, you son of a gun, how you made me suffer with your damn Santos!” He also asked me to apologize to Dona Celeste on his behalf for cursing her so many times over the years while he watched me play.

  We’d laugh and laugh.

  I always got along well with Lula. But I was extremely disappointed when I found out, shortly after his election, that he was going to dismantle the vilas olimpicas. The vilas had been very successful, even after I left the ministry. I pleaded with Lula to reconsider. But he said he wanted to end the program, apparently because his own party had a different project. Not a better project, mind you—a different one. And so funding for the vilas was cut.

  This is one of the things I’ve never understood about politics. Politicians are so busy fighting one another, and trying to destroy one another’s accomplishments for their own self-interest, that they don’t think about what’s best for the people. The end of the vilas was, in my mind, the final proof that politics wasn’t the right game for me.

  That said, there have been a lot of positive changes in Brazil, and in the world, over the last twenty years or so. Within my own country, some thirty-five million people have been pulled out of poverty and into the middle class—the equivalent of four times the population of New York City. That old Brazilian problem—social and economic inequality—has also improved. Some aspects of the sick, hungry Brazil—the one the team doctors tried to “save” us from prior to the 1958 Cup in Sweden—have faded away. For example, in the 1950s, an average Brazilian could expect to live just forty-six years, compared to sixty-nine years in the United States. That was a huge gap. Today, an average Brazilian can expect to live seventy-three years, just five years behind the U.S. It’s no coincidence that, as this improvement took place, we saw school enrollment rise dramatically, thanks in part to the programs that we helped implement during the 1990s. Brazil now has nearly full enrollment at the primary school level. For personal reasons, because of my own past, this gives me enormous satisfaction. It’s an achievement that will continue to have benefits for decades to come.

  Within Brazil, a lot of people tend to credit our last two presidents for the progress. And it’s true: Fernando Henrique and Lula both did a lot of good things. But I’ve traveled the world enough to know that Brazil does not exist in a vacuum. The same progress we’ve enjoyed in Brazil has been repeated in countless other countries. Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty—usually defined as surviving on less than $1.25 a day—has fallen by almost one billion since 1990. I’ve seen evidence of this on my travels for UNICEF and other organizations to Africa, Southeast Asia, and the rest of Latin America. There is
still an enormous amount of poverty in the world, more than there should be. But, with some exceptions, you don’t see the same degree of misery that you used to. The faces of hunger, disease and hopelessness—the faces I remember seeing often when I was growing up, and in my early travels as a player—are now fewer and farther between.

  There are a lot of reasons for the improvement. Even if I understood them perfectly, I wouldn’t try to explain them all here. But I think back on my own experiences, and the way the world was back in 1950, when Brazilians gathered as a nation for the first time to listen to the championship game at the Maracanã. After that day, people always seemed more connected to Brazil as a nation, and more likely to think of themselves as part of a community. Once we were unified like that, we could never be pulled fully back apart. In the 1960s, as people became more aware of the world around them, they began demanding greater rights for themselves, and for the poor, in part because they wanted Brazil to be as good in real life as it was on the soccer field. I also think about how, around that same time, we started emphasizing our own individual abilities less and thinking more of teamwork and collaboration. These values were, in turn, becoming more widely accepted around the world, not just on the soccer field.

  More recently, as the sport became richer, I’ve seen again and again how the fruits of soccer’s popularity have been used to help the lives of the less fortunate, whether through direct donations or through clinics or other worthwhile programs that enable youths to play organized soccer. Speaking from personal experience—once a boy or a girl steps on a soccer field, they feel equal to everyone else in their village, and in the world. That feeling of pride and empowerment—once kids taste it, it never goes away. They demand more from their politicians. They demand for themselves, and for their families. As well they should.

  Yes, I do think soccer has helped make the world a better place. It may not be the main factor—but it has been important. The values that our sport teaches are universal. They’ve made me a better person, and countless others as well.

  7

  After all those goals, and all those championships, which do you think is the most famous goal in Brazilian history?

  Is it Carlos Alberto’s crowning goal in the “Beautiful Team’s” final against Italy in 1970?

  Didi’s rocket that capped “the finest three minutes in soccer” against the Soviet Union in 1958?

  Or my header against Sweden in the final minute of that same World Cup?

  None of the above. The goal that people still talk about most, that plays over and over in Brazilians’ heads, remains Alcides Ghiggia’s game-winner against us at the Maracanã in 1950.

  It has been sixty-four years! And still . . .

  A big part of that goal’s enduring hold on us is the fact that Brazil hasn’t hosted a World Cup since then. Even though Brazil has won more World Cups than any other country, with five, most of our rivals have enjoyed the pleasure of winning the Cup on their home soil—Argentina, West Germany, England, Italy . . . not us. Believe me, I’ve seen it: There is nothing quite like celebrating a world championship won in your own country. The patriotism, the mayhem of the crowd, the pride the players feel, is without equal.

  Brazil was a finalist to host the Cup in 1994, a bid that I opposed because I believed our country needed to spend its money on other, more important things, as I’ve already noted. But by the mid-2000s, as the economy improved, it seemed to give us a little breathing room. Meanwhile, Lula’s government vowed that not a cent of public money would be spent on World Cup stadiums. He also promised that we’d use the Cup as an excuse to build all kinds of roads and public transportation and airports and other projects that Brazil had been putting off for years, if not decades. So it sounded like a pretty good deal, and I was thrilled when Brazil was awarded the 2014 World Cup. We won the right to host the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, and that made me happy and proud as well.

  Unfortunately, things haven’t turned out as promised. The plan to get private-sector banks to fund the stadiums never really panned out, and public financing was used instead. Many of the big infrastructure projects got canceled or postponed, and the stadiums turned out to be overdue and over budget. I guess I, of all people, should have known better. After all, if you budget one hundred million dollars for a stadium, they never build it for ninety million and then say: “Here, you can have the rest of the money back.” Especially not in Brazil, and especially not in Brazilian soccer.

  By the middle of 2013, a lot of Brazilians were very upset about all of this and staged some street protests during the Confederations Cup, which is a kind of warm-up tournament that takes place a year before the World Cup in the host country. Many people were mad that public financing had been directed to stadiums instead of hospitals and schools and other public services. One Brazilian protester even held up a sign that said: JAPAN, I’D TRADE MY SOCCER FOR YOUR EDUCATION.

  As somebody who had once committed the heresy of opposing a World Cup because I didn’t think Brazil could afford it, I supported much of what the protesters were saying. There were lots of things to be upset about in Brazil. However, I did worry a bit about politics trickling onto the soccer field itself; I’d seen that happen so many times as a player, and it always made me sad. Some people online were encouraging fans to turn their back on the field during the national anthem, for example. Luckily, the games themselves went ahead as planned. Brazil even ended up winning the Confederations Cup, and all the fans were great about it.

  I think that the 2014 World Cup is going to be great fun—a bit of a logistical mess, maybe, but great fun nonetheless. The stadiums will be full of adoring fans, the beaches will be immaculate, and the beverages will be flowing. Brazil knows how to throw a party, and our soccer tradition is second to none. We’re known for our hospitality, and our people are eager to welcome the three hundred thousand or so visitors expected. We have some good players on the team, too. I know I’m sure that Brazil, and Brazilian soccer, will win over a whole new generation of fans all over the world.

  And if we end up playing Uruguay in the final at the Maracanã, oh my goodness. I might be too nervous to attend. I might have to go to church with Mom instead!

  8

  In my office in Santos, I have a picture on my wall of Dondinho, flanked by me and my son, Edinho. We’re each giving him a kiss on the cheek. It reminds me of some of my happiest days, when Edinho and I would play soccer in the yard at our house in Guarujá while my dad sat there and watched. Dad would be quiet for a while. Then he’d start yelling out tips: “The side of the foot, come on!” And finally, when he just couldn’t take it any longer, he’d get to his feet, smile and say: “Well, boys, pass it over here! I have a little experience with the ball too, you know!”

  Three generations of the Nascimento family, playing soccer and having a good laugh. Nothing ever made me happier. My dad passed away in 1997, from heart problems. Soccer hasn’t had quite the same joy for me since. I miss him every day.

  When Dondinho died, Mom surprised me by producing an old relic—my old shoe-shining kit from Baurú. My eyes just about popped out of my head. I thought that thing had been lost for half a century—I have no idea where she’d been keeping it. But there it was, with the old brush and even a little bit of hardened polish still inside. When I opened it, out popped an old piece of money—a four-hundred-reis coin. Brazil has had seven or eight different currencies in my lifetime, because of all those financial problems we had, and it’s impossible to keep track of how much each was worth. But I’m guessing that it would have been a decent bit of change back in the 1950s, especially for a family as poor as ours was.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “That’s the first money you ever made for us,” Mom said softly. “I kept it because you worked so hard for it.”

  Well, you know me well enough by now to know what I did next! It was a really emotional moment for both of us.
It reminded me how fortunate I’ve been throughout my life. I was blessed by God with a special talent, and lucky enough to be able to use it and enjoy it throughout my entire life. I was able to earn a good living for myself, and support many loved ones as well.

  I’m in my eighth decade of life now, and I guess I’ve started to slow down just a little bit—to set aside a little more time for Edson. When I’m at home in Brazil, in my house just outside Santos, I spend a lot of time in a little garden on the back end of the property. I’ve got some herbs, some collard greens, and some spring onions and other vegetables. I’ve been known to lose hours and hours back there, pulling out weeds and watering the plants. It’s usually just me and my thoughts; in fact, I jokingly refer to the garden as “my psychologist.”

  Even there, though, in that quiet, warm patch of lush greenness, the reminders of the life I’ve lived are ever present. On a trip in the late 1970s to Thailand, I remember tasting a fruit that I found particularly delightful—the lychee, which grows on a tree native to southeast Asia. It’s a delicious little thing, a juicy, sweet fruit inside a red, thorny shell. We didn’t have lychees in Brazil back then. So—forgive me!—after some deliberation, I decided to smuggle a few seeds back home. I put the seeds inside my shoes. My heart was pounding when I went through customs! But I slipped through undetected, and planted a few of the seeds in my backyard. They’re good-sized trees now, and they still produce fruit. During all this time, Brazil and the world have become more open, and you can find lychee in a lot of restaurants and bars in São Paulo and elsewhere. But every time I look at those trees, I remember my travels, and I think about how dramatically the world has changed.