As ever, Erling Haaland was spot on. “Everything you see any player doing,” he tweeted. “Pele did it first. RIP.” It was a simple tribute, a paean to the Brazil icon that mirrored Haaland’s extraordinary efficiency on the pitch. Eleven words to get to the point, a the job done with effortless simplicity.
Us Premier League observers are marvelling at Haaland’s impact in England’s top league, his use of space and angles to disrupt some of the best defenders in the world. But the man himself is absolutely correct: Pele was doing that sort of thing long before the current greats of our game.
You just need to watch a viral video that has been doing the rounds in the wake of his death at the age of 82 to see what Haaland meant.
In it, someone has stitched together footage of a galaxy of stars pulling off their trademark tricks: Zidane bursts pasts defenders with the strength of an ox and grace of a gazelle, Ronaldinho executes a pass with breathtaking balance. Lionel Messi does what he does, slaloming past a queue of would be executioners. Johan Cruyff pulls off the turn that came to bear his name. On each occasion, the trick is followed by black and white often grainy footage of Pele doing exactly the same thing. Only he did it first.
The message here seems fairly clear. It is quite something to be the best in the world at the world’s most popular sport but to actively re-invent it, as Pele does, rightly takes him to a totally different plane.
For those of us who didn’t get to see him play live, what strikes you when you view in-game footage is what an extraordinary marriage of technique, power and ingenuity he brought to the game.
Time and again Pele appears to be so far ahead of opponents with speed of thought and movement that he feels like a time traveller on the field.
Of course he was blessed with physical gifts to be the best but Pele took it further. He was an innovator, a digital footballer in the analogue age.
Related Stories
It is tempting to let the mind wander to how much Pele might have been worth in the modern game, what kind of wage and transfer fee he might have commanded. That he only played for Santos and New York Cosmos allows us to speculate about how he might have landed if he’d played in England, Italy or Spain.
The sort of numbers he would attract these days would be eye-watering but he was an innovator in his day, too, cashing in on his fame with that extraordinary move to the US.
He certainly wasn’t averse to monetising his brand later in his life. Most of the images of the great man were of him bedecked in a blazer promoting one brand or another, glad-handing some suit or other.
As his glittering career faded further into the memory he would often travel to England on corporate junkets, play up to whatever local cause was in fashion at the time and then depart – which might explain why he had assembled such a compendium of extraordinary predictions by the time he had reached his dotage.
Few need reminding that he predicted an African team would win the World Cup by the year 2000, but even fewer might recall that he supposedly predicted Nicky Barmby would become one of best on the planet. Those missteps were in stark contrast to a man who could do no wrong on the pitch.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/fnPVo7O
Post a Comment