Friday, December 30, 2022

 



















 
 
 














 Brazilian football icon dies (Pele)



Football has lost its King. This Thursday (12/29), Pelé, the greatest player in history, died at the age of 82. Elected player of the century and was one of the two joint winners of the FIFA Best Player of the Century award. That same year, Pelé was elected Athlete of the Century by the International Olympic Committee. According to the IFFHS, Pelé is the second highest scorer in football history in official games, scoring 765 goals in 812 matches, and a total of 1283 goals in 1363 games that include unofficial friendlies, a Guinness world record.

During his career , he became for a period th highest paid athlete in the world.

In 1975, he came out of retirement to play for the New York Cosmos. The club's president, a former British journalist named Clive Toye, made some millionaire offers to Pelé while he was still playing for the Baixada team, but it didn't cross his mind to abandon the shirt he had spent his entire life as a player. Santos himself would not give up his star. However, thanks to the bankruptcy of a company called Fiolax, a component factory in which he had a small stake and which used him as a guarantor for a millionaire loan, Pelé was left with a bill of millions of dollars to pay, which made him change his idea about retiring.



The world's greatest player hits the ball with fans in Central Park in 1975 ERIC SCHWEIKARDT/GETTY IMAGES Pelé in NY: how his visit to Cosmos proved the majesty of the player. While enchanting the city with his "beautiful game", the King enjoyed himself in the company of Sylvester Stallone and Robert Redford, posed for Andy Warhol and was kissed by Muhammad Ali, who thought football was more beautiful than boxing. The star played for Cosmos for three years, in the “waste land of football”, as the English press called the United States, a country that did not know how to play with its feet and preferred the drowsiness of baseball matches or the intelligent truculence of American football – the only one they still call “football”. But then Pele arrived. At the age of 34, and still flying, he coined the term “beautiful game” to differentiate the two sports.