Pele and the invention of greatness - The Warm-Up

When the Warm-Up was a young Warm-Up, in England in the 1990s, the question 'who is the greatest footballer of all time?' was both easier and more difficult to answer. There was no Lionel Messi around, not yet; there was no vexed Messi-Ronaldo dialectic to collapse into. Instead the candidates came down to us from history: Alfredo Di Stefano, George Best, Johan Cruyff, Diego Maradona in his cherubic form, and of course Pele, who died yesterday at the age of 82.

More difficult, then, because we didn't really know what we were talking about. But easier for the same reason. You could just pick your favourite, and even somebody who was old enough to have seen them play a time or two couldn't really contradict you. The very best moments of Pele's club career, the pick of the goals for Santos and Brazil and the glamour of that spell in New York, could be mined from VHS tapes and pieced together from books. But the nuances and the details were almost totally inaccessible. Brazil were a thing that happened every four years.

Naturally, your choice reflected an aspect of your own personal self-creation. You chose Maradona if you were trying to be a little bit dangerous, Cruyff if you were trying to be clever, maybe Di Stefano if you'd heard of him and were trying to show off. You chose Best if you were operating on a principle of Manchester United loyalty, and there was a lot of that around in the '90s. And you chose Pele… well, as far as the Warm-Up can remember, nobody really chose Pele.

Instead he was just there, the still centre of the endless argument. It is not an insult to say that "Pele" felt like the safe answer; rather, it is another way of saying that Pele felt like the right answer. There is more to greatness than the half-formed thoughts of half-grown children killing time on a playground, and yet Pele's greatness was so all-encompassing, so self-evident, so present in every clip - those burning yellow shirts - and in every word anybody wrote or said about him, that we all knew, even as we affected to know different.

One of the greatest pictures of Pele isn't a picture of him at all. Instead it's a poster, put up by theatre workers during the 1970 World Cup: "Today we won’t work because we’re going to see Pele."

As with so much about Pele, it manages to be at once hugely anachronistic but also prophetic. He was the tipping point between football in black-and-white and football in colour; he was the first star to go super, to break the confines of football as a sport and achieve a truly international celebrity, one that didn't transcend football but instead dragged football along with it. You know that a life has been lived well and strangely when you can find tribute quotes from both Paddy Crerand and Andy Warhol.

Football was a different place back then, and from where we are now, it's almost impossible to imagine the greatest player in the world never playing a single game for a European club. But so much of Pele's story has become archetype, even perhaps stereotype: this is the arc along which the life of the footballing superstar curves. These are the story beats.

To take the biggest possible example, the World Cup matters because it's the World Cup. It's a trophy. It's the trophy. But trophies are won by teams as teams, and the World Cup also has another aspect, as the last and greatest test of true greatness. This is unfair, of course, not least to all potential greats that are born to countries incapable of winning the thing, but it was all laid out in Qatar just a couple of weeks ago. That win didn't make Messi any greater but it made his greatness more complete. And that, perhaps, is thanks to Pele, who won the World Cup early and then again late; who was kicked out of it and came back for more; and who in the process first avenged and then defined a footballing nation. He made the World Cup just as the World Cup made him.

And perhaps that's a better way of thinking about the question of greatness. Not a question of who scored the most or scored the best, won the most or won the best, but who defined the terms of the conversation. Perhaps one of the other clever answers is the true right answer. Perhaps Messi, in the final analysis, has got there and got past. But the question itself is shaped around Pele, around what he did and how he did it. Whatever footballing greatness is - and your Warm-Up still doesn't really know for sure - it is that because of him.

Real superstars grab the attention, whatever they are up to. And Pele's departure from this mortal coil had the unintended consequence of entirely distracting the Warm-Up from an evening of Championship football. We'd like to have been working, but we were watching Pele.

But some of the goals got through, as they always must, and we particularly enjoyed these two. First of all this, from James McAtee. What we particularly like here isn't the run itself, which is one of those where the defence just splinters apart like rotten wood, but the finish. Done by the eyes doesn't quite cover it; that keeper's been turned to stone. Then, delightfully, McAtee nearly wipes himself out while celebrating.

And then there was this, by Alfie Doughty, as pure a Hot Shot Hamish curve as we've seen in quite some time.

We're not going to say anything as grandiose as 'these goals embodied the principle of o joga bonito by which Pele lived', because that would be vastly overstating the case and you'd rightly be annoyed. But a lot of what Pele did, as well being brilliant, was fun and funny, and these goals did both make us laugh.

As did this, for different reasons. All own goals are beautiful in their own way, however spectacular or straightforward. But there is something special about own goals like the one below, where the space between 'hang on' and 'oh no' is bridged by a moment in which the defender thinks that they've actually done something good. One brief, beautiful flash of serene competence, and then it immediately explodes.

A lot of Pele content around today, but here's one or two picks to get you going. First, the great David Goldblatt has a piece in the Guardian on Pele as football's first "global celebrity", and also on the significance of that first World Cup win in 1958.

"It is worth recalling how much was riding on this moment for Brazil. The country’s scintillating Afro-Brazilian stars, such as Leonidas, first caught the world’s attention at the 1938 World Cup. Commentators at the time suggested that the country’s hybrid Afro-Indian-European demography was the greatest strength behind its football and culture. The 1950 World Cup, held in Brazil, was meant to cement this notion, but the shock defeat to Uruguay in the final game – the Maracanazo – was read as a failure of the country’s modernisation and its pathological miscegenation; the black players were made scapegoats for the defeat and racist stereotypes were reactivated. In 1958 the curse was lifted. Brazil’s super-diverse squad had become champions playing in their own unique style; Pele was the star, and the world took notice."

Then, keeping things in house, here's Jonathan Wilson writing for Eurosport on, among other things, the 1970 World Cup final: Brazil "had produced football that felt, like the moon landings the year before, like a victory for all of humanity. This was modernity, and this was the beauty it could yield."

And that tournament was "capped by Carlos Alberto’s goal in the final against Italy, teed up by Pele’s perfectly timed lay-off. It was, in a sense, the distillation of his ability. He was skilful, of course, inventive and far better in the air than his physique might have suggested: he had scored a textbook header earlier in the game. But what really set him apart, what elevated him above the merely brilliant to be one of the greatest was his capacity to see patterns and shapes and possibilities a fraction before everybody else."

As Wilson notes in that piece above, for a man who scored so many goals - and if he says he scored more than a thousand, we're not going to argue - it's interesting that the moments people return to, again and again, are the ones that aren't goals. That pass. That save. That shot from the halfway line. And this dummy.

Only 21 seconds, that clip, and not even a goal, yet there's more genius in that video than most footballers manage in a career. So, off you go, off into Youtube, off to find the rest of him. Remember: you're not going to work because you're going to watch Pele.

And if you're after something less familiar, here is Vexamao, from 1969, by Elis Regina featuring Pele. True superstars feel like superstars even when they're doing something they're not particularly good at. We're betting Marilyn Monroe could burn toast and make everybody swoon. Which is to say, Pele might not have been the greatest singer in the world, but he sang like the greatest footballer in the world, and that's more than worth your time.

A chance for two of the Premier League's potential crisis clubs to enter the new year on a really unpleasant note. West Ham are at home to Brentford, and Leicester are away at Liverpool.