Install App?
OPUS +
digital.thisisopus.com
This is how the Install App dialog will look like once your App goes live.
He made quite an impact at Santos in 1958, let alone for his World Cup-winning national team, breaking into the starting eleven and helping the unfancied club win the league championship that year. Pelé scored 58 goals during the campaign, a Brazilian league record that stands to this day.
When he returned from Sweden’s World Cup tournament still a 17 year old, he became an instant superstar, not just in Brazil but around the world. At Santos he had only just begun. Over the next 16 years he became a goal machine and, in the process, transformed his club into the most successful outfit in Brazil, despite the wealthier and better-known teams from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
The first challenge that Santos faced was warding other clubs off their young star. Real Madrid, Manchester United and Juventus all made enquiries and Inter Milan managed to get far enough down the track to prepare a contract, only for Santos to veto it in the light of mass displeasure from the Santos fan base.
In 1959 Pelé played a significant part in Santos winning their first Torneio Rio-São Paulo with a 3-0 win over Vasco de Gama. Having failed to defend their league title that year, Santos bounced back in 1960 to claim a second title in three years. Pelé contributed another 47 goals to the successful campaign. The club also won the Taça Brasil that same year, beating Bahia in the final. Pelé was the tournament’s top scorer with nine goals.
This triumph gave Santos the chance to start competing in the Copa Libertadores, the biggest and most prestigious tournament in the western hemisphere, akin to the European Cup. In 1962 Santos began their Copa onslaught by topping a group that also consisted of Cerro Porteño of Paraguay and Deportivo Municipal of Bolivia. They then defeated Chilean team Universidad Católica in the semi-final before facing defending champions Peñarol from Montevideo in the final. Pelé scored twice to secure a first ever Copa Libertadores triumph for his club, taking his tally in the competition to four goals. This made him the second top scorer.
He and Santos were not done there, either. The same year the team would successfully defend the Campeonato Paulista (with Pelé scoring 37 goals), and the Taça Brasil, with Pelé scoring four goals in the final series against Botafogo. Santos would also win the inaugural Intercontinental Cup as South American champions against their European counterparts, Benfica, from Lisbon. Pelé’s performance, which included a hat-trick in the 5-2 win in Portugal, is regarded as one of his finest.
Benfica’s goalkeeper, Costa Pereira, summed the experience up. “I arrived hoping to stop a great man,” he said. “I went away convinced I had been undone by someone who was not born on the same planet as the rest of us.”
In 1963 Santos, as defending champions, were given a bye to the semi-finals of the Copa Libertadores. Pelé scored a vital late goal in a 1-1 draw at Botafogo – a team that included Garrincha and Jairzinho – before adding a hat-trick in the return leg, a 4-0 home win. Then, in the final, they beat Boca Juniors 3-2 and 2-1, the latter seeing Pelé score in Buenos Aires. It is the only time a Brazilian club has won the Copa on Argentinian soil. Santos would also win the Rio-São Paulo title as well as the Taça Brasil and the Intercontinental Cup, where they beat Milan.
A year later Santos would win back the Paulista, with Pelé grabbing 37 goals, shared the Rio-São Paulo title and won, for the fourth successive season, the Taça Brasil. The club would go on to win the Paulista in 1967, 1968 and 1969. In that last year Santos also played an exhibition match in Lagos, Nigeria, where the two warring parties in the civil war agreed to a 48-hour ceasefire just so they could watch Pelé and his team. Afterwards the war continued for a year.
On November 19th, 1969, Pelé scored his thousandth goal in all competitions. It was a highly anticipated event achieved by a penalty kick against Vasco da Gama at the Maracanã. Even though Santos were the away team, over 80,000 fans cheered and applauded this moment of football history.
There is much debate over exactly how many goals Pelé ended up scoring
for his beloved Santos. Officially he netted 643 times for the club but he also scored another 448 times in the many ‘friendlies’ he played both domestically and internationally. In many cases these friendlies, against the biggest teams in European football, were of a better standard than the official professional league games.
After the end of the 1974 season (his 19th with Santos) Pelé retired, although he was persuaded to play again for the New York Cosmos in the North American Soccer League. No other individual would get close to matching the impact he made for the sport in North America. Despite being past his prime, his fame brought adulation wherever he went to the point that he was stretchered away in Boston after being injured by an overenthusiastic fan. Franz Beckenbauer, the legendary German captain, and Carlos Alberto, who lifted the 1970 World Cup for Brazil, followed Pelé to New York and, later, the likes of Bobby Moore, George Best and Eusébio.
In Pelé’s third and final season in 1977 he led the Cosmos to victory in the NASL, beating the Seattle Sounders in the final, 2-1. In his final career game Pelé, now 37, played one half for Santos and one half for the Cosmos in an exhibition match at the Giants Stadium in New York. He would score the winner for Santos with a 30-yard free kick, his final goal in a career sporting a staggering 1,282 goals. Both Muhammad Ali and Bobby Moore were in attendance.
Pelé almost single-handedly turned Santos into a global force. When he left
it would take the club a quarter of a century before they tasted meaningful success again. In America he was the major reason why levels of interest in football rose so dramatically.
By any standards his was one of the great club careers in the history of professional football clubs. Probably the greatest. And the reason why little Santos is known to this day.
match against Newcastle United in Hong Kong.