Mouring Edson Arantes do Nascimento (1940-2022), the King of Football

Brazilian football legend Pelé, widely considered one of the best players ever, if not the best, died yesterday after a year-long battle with colon cancer. He was 82 years old.

Brazil has planned 48 hours of national mourning. Pelé, is expected to be buried in Santos, southeast of Sao Paulo, where he played for the city's club from 1956 to 1974. Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, said in a statement Pelé's "life was about more than football. He changed perceptions for the better in Brazil, in South America and across the world." 

The UK's Guardian has a great piece on his career and how he came to be the face of football the world over. Pelé burst onto the world stage when he was just 17 scoring six goals to help Brazil win the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. He stole the show in the final which Brazil won over hosts Sweden, 5-2, with two goals that were "an illustration of the ability that set him apart from all other footballers. The first was a breathtaking piece of skill; he controlled the ball on his chest, chipped it back over his head and then ran around the flummoxed defender and volleyed it into the net. For the second, he soared above his marker before making a perfectly placed header." He is the only player to have won the World Cup three times (1958, 1962, and 1970).

"Pelé was blessed with a blend of supreme athleticism, skill and tactical vision...His sheer physicality and turn of speed were electrifying as he homed in on goal, outsprinting or simply charging through defences while managing to keep the ball under close control."  Those qualities made him a hot commodity as wealthy clubs attempted to lure him away from Brazil, offering a then unheard-of $1m to his club, Santos FC. But in 1961, Brazil's president Jânio Quadros "declared Pelé a 'non-exportable national treasure', ensuring that he remained at the club for almost two decades."

 It was at the 1970 World Cup, however, that Pelé truly became a global phenomenon. It was the first football tournament watched live by a worldwide television audience and also the first to be broadcast in color. "In the brilliant Mexican sunshine, the gold shirts and cobalt blue shorts of Brazil dazzled the watching world. They won the tournament for the third time – beating Italy 4-1 in the final – by playing football of such imagination and thrilling execution that it is regarded as one of the high-water marks in the history of sport...with Pelé [its] most potent symbol." After that World Cup he was the most recognizable man in sport.

In 1999 Pelé was named athlete of the century by the IOC and in 2000 FIFA player of the century (jointly with Diego Maradona). Pelé first two marriages ended in divorce. In 2016 he married his third wife, Marcia Cibele Aoki. She survives him, along with six children from prior relationships.