By Steve Sailer
12/30/2022
The Brazilian soccer legend has died at 82.
Pelé was enormously famous when I was a kid, from 1969 onward, when he scored his 1000th goal in a league game for visiting Santos at the massive 200,000 capacity Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Back then, if you were a Brazilian working man in Santos on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, you could go see Pelé ten or twenty times per year playing home games in the Brazilian league, while Lionel Messi of Rosario, Argentina has played all his pro league games in Europe since he was 13. The Third World isn’t what it used to be.
(Heck, my dad and I saw Santos, without Pelé, play at Maracana for about $0.75 in 1978, although after the game when we were looking for a nonexistent taxicab, we only escaped with our wallets and/or our lives due to the kindness of a Brazilian bodybuilder dwarf who insisted we stop trying to find a nonexistent cab and get on his bus back to Copacabana full of German soccer fans he was tour-guiding. When we mentioned to him we were from Los Angeles, he sheepishly admitted he always wanted to visit Muscle Beach. One of the nagging regrets of my life is that I immediately thought, “I should tell this 4-foot-tall great guy who just saved my life that there’s this fellow from Muscle Beach named Arnold Schwarzenegger and he’s going to make your hobby of bodybuilding the coolest thing in Hollywood.” But then I didn’t. I failed. I mean, for once in my life I knew what the future would be before even, say, James Cameron, did, who wasn’t sure who should star in Terminator. And yet I was too shy/reticent/stupid to speak up in a situation in which two sentences from me would have made this bodybuilding dwarf happy for a month or a year or a half dozen years until he saw Terminator in 1984. I don’t have a lot of regrets in my life — that time I could have made a fortune in the Internet Bubble of the Nineties but I didn’t because I had cancer — eh, whatever. But not speaking up in 1978 when I had a perfectly accurate vision of the future that would have made this life-saving dwarf happy… that I regret.)
This is assuming you were the kind of sports fan who read Sports Illustrated and watched Wide World of Sports like I did. For example, I can vividly recall a Brian Glanville short story in the October 1971 Boy Scout magazine Boys’ Life, “Paying the Penalty,” about the second-string goaltender for England facing a Pelé penalty kick in the World Cup.
My impression is that soccer was higher-scoring back then. My recollection of soccer headlines from 50 years ago tends toward, to make one up: “Santos Comes From Behind in Friendly to Beat Barcelona 5-4 on Pelé’s Three Goals.” Soccer seemed glamorous back then, while in my adult years it has seemed grimmer, such as the Brazil-Italy nil-nil final in the 1994 World Cup in the Rose Bowl.
On the other hand, it’s not clear from World Cup scoring averages that Pelé’s gaudy statistics much benefited from a more offensive environment. The really high scoring World Cup tournaments were 1930-1954.
Pelé made his spectacular debut in 1958 at age 17 when he scored six goals, three in the semifinal and two in the final. In that 1958 tournament, teams averaged 3.60 goals per game, just over a third higher than in the 2022 World Cup, when they averaged 2.69. (Everybody wanted to complain about this rather ridiculous off-season World Cup because everybody assumes Qatar earned it through bribery… but the games turned out to be pretty exciting, the 3-3 Final was terrific, and the greatest player of this century finally won his World Cup due to his outstanding play.)
But in Pelé’s last three World Cups (in which he was injured and missed games in both Brazil’s win in 1962, led by Garrincha, and the 1966 fizzle, before returning strong for the Brazil Dream Team of 1970s win), World Cup scoring averages were in roughly the same range as the last three World Cups.
On the other hand, some of the depressed scoring in the World Cup back then was less due to the sophistication of the defenses than to how brutal the play was with national honor on the line. After being hacked viciously in 1962 and 1966, Pelé swore he’d never play in another World Cup, but then returned in 1970 for a third World Cup title that cemented his legend.
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