Pelé

No two ways about it, Pelé was a very fine foot­baller. If that comes across as sound­ing a lit­tle mealy-mouthed, it’s entire­ly befit­ting of this under­stat­ed doc­u­men­tary which – unusu­al­ly for an autho­rised sport­ing biog­ra­phy – doesn’t deal in reduc­tive and essen­tial­ly mean­ing­less terms like ​‘GOAT’. Direc­tors Ben Nicholas and David Try­horn are not here to mere­ly embell­ish their subject’s bona fides.

Born Edson Arantes do Nasci­men­to into a sta­ble but impov­er­ished fam­i­ly in the south of Brazil, Pelé’s sto­ry is one defined by odds and stats. As a teenag­er he defied his low social stand­ing by sign­ing for San­tos; by the time he hung up his boots in 1977, fol­low­ing a brief stint with New York Cos­mos, he had racked up an aston­ish­ing 1279 goals, includ­ing over 600 for his boy­hood club and 77 for the Brazil­ian men’s nation­al team. His career in num­bers almost defies log­ic. But, of course, there is so much more to it than that.

Although the legit­i­ma­cy of Pelé’s goal-scor­ing record is fierce­ly debat­ed (friend­ly match­es shouldn’t count, some argue), there is no deny­ing that he shaped the beau­ti­ful game in a way that few oth­ers have. This is his real lega­cy, and it far out­weighs the laun­dry list of indi­vid­ual hon­ours he accrued. He may be the only per­son to have lift­ed the FIFA World Cup three times, but he also rein­vent­ed how foot­ball was played at the elite lev­el, almost sin­gle-hand­ed. The sheer force of his tal­ent demand­ed it: defend­ers and for­wards alike had to adapt just to keep pace with him.

Much of the archival footage fea­tured in this film will be famil­iar to even the most casu­al foot­ball fan, but when placed in con­text it’s imme­di­ate­ly strik­ing how mod­ern Pelé’s style of play was. At his peak he scored goals for fun and did things in the flood-lit white heat of sport­ing bat­tle that most play­ers wouldn’t dare attempt on the train­ing ground; the famous clip of him dum­my­ing Uruguayan goal­keep­er Ladis­lao Mazurkiewicz at the 1970 World Cup before plac­ing a shot ago­nis­ing­ly wide of the post is still aston­ish­ing for its ele­gance and audacity.

But enough about how great Pelé was on the pitch. We know this. Cru­cial­ly, the film switch­es focus mid­way through to gauge his impact away from foot­ball. Pelé was already a nation­al icon by the time the mil­i­tary dic­ta­tor­ship came to pow­er in Brazil in 1964, but after the coup he came to rep­re­sent some­thing else, both to the ordi­nary work­ing folk who idolised him and those who sought to exploit his pop­u­lar­i­ty for their own polit­i­cal gain.

Par­al­lels with anoth­er sport­ing colos­sus of the day, Muham­mad Ali, are telling: since retir­ing Pelé has worked to erad­i­cate lep­rosy and become a promi­nent UNICEF ambas­sador, but he was a con­spic­u­ous­ly silent objec­tor to Brazil’s author­i­tar­i­an lead­er­ship, going so far as to defend his inac­tion on the grounds that he was just a foot­baller and nev­er want­ed to be in the pub­lic eye. Not exact­ly the man of the peo­ple he is some­times paint­ed as, then.

There’s a recur­ring motif in the film which sees Pelé (who, along­side for­mer team­mates and coach­es, includ­ing Amar­il­do, Jairz­in­ho and Zagal­lo, offers an in-per­son run­ning com­men­tary) drum­ming his hands on an old wood­en shoe-shine box. The sug­ges­tion is that this is the same box he once car­ried around with him on the dusty streets of Bau­ru, when as a child he was forced to work to sup­ple­ment his father’s mea­gre income. It’s a quaint image that epit­o­mis­es the endur­ing, self-per­pet­u­at­ed image of Pelé as a benign, inef­fec­tu­al folk hero rather well.