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Live updating: Pelé dies aged 82: tributes paid to a football great – live updates and reaction

Pelé, one of football's all-time greats, dies aged 82 – video obituary

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16m ago
06.53 AEDT

Richard Williams

The emergence of the teenaged Pelé during the 1958 World Cup opened a door to a new dimension of football. The brief televised highlights of the matches in Sweden were broadcast in a black and white that was actually more like blurred shades of grey but already the Brazilian prodigy seemed to be sharply focused and bathed in a golden glow.

The skinny 17-year-old with the flat-top haircut scored six goals, several of them executed with an impudent wit and a hitherto unimaginable level of technique, and then wept openly on the shoulder of Gilmar, the team’s goalkeeper, when the triumph was secured. For many of his new fans in foreign lands, Edson Arantes do Nascimento was the first complicated foreign name they committed to memory.

Twelve years after that first eruption of genius he won his third World Cup winner’s medal. The 1970 tournament was watched by many viewers on colour television sets, a high proportion of them purchased specially for the occasion. Football has never seemed as splendid as when Pelé – now a mature man of 29 – was at the heart of a team including Tostão, Jairzinho, Gérson, Roberto Rivellino and Carlos Alberto, an ensemble of masters surrounded by their own golden aura as they took the game to a new level of creative interplay, with the No 10 as their conductor.

Read the full tribute here:

https://www.theguardian.com/football/live/2022/dec/29/pele-dies-aged-82-tributes-paid-to-a-football-great-live-updates-and-reaction