Pelé: Eternity Does Not Write Itself

Pelé would have celebrated his birthday yesterday. He would have turned 86. The departed demand such grammatical care. With everything else, we are far less attentive. We proclaim them eternal and move swiftly on to the next headline. A manager raised an eyebrow. A forward deleted a photo. There is a controversy—there is always a controversy. Pelé can wait. And wait he does.

He was born on 23 October 1940, in Três Corações. The calendar did its duty. There were tributes, headlines, and those restoring his name and face to the spotlight. It was not met with complete silence. Yet, there is a vast distance between marking a date and preserving a legacy. Memory also requires time, and our time has already been sold off to the next trending topic.

Pelé is eternal, we say. The phrase rolls off the tongue with ease. It works in a caption, at an awards ceremony, in a farewell speech. Then we shut the drawer. Eternity remains locked away inside, neatly tucked away so as not to disturb the present news cycle. Until the next anniversary. Until someone remembers that it is necessary to remember. It is a strange way to treat an immortal: granting him such a grand word, but so little space.

Whether he was the greatest of all time is beside the point. That debate reduces football to an accounting office where figures are audited to award a badge of greatness. There is always someone with one more argument, one more statistic, one cherry-picked clip to settle the debate. The argument never ends. What matters far more is what Pelé made it possible to imagine.

Before him, there were great players. There were giants and idols. But Pelé was the first sporting icon to reach a stature that transcended football itself. His name reached places where match commentary had never been heard. One word. Just one word: Pelé. That was all it took. It never needed a translation, an explanation, or a list of honours. The entire world fit into a single four-letter name.

In 1958, a 17-year-old boy inspired Brazil to their first World Cup triumph. He lifted the trophy again in 1962. By 1970, after enduring relentless kicks from opponents unable to stop him any other way, he was still reinventing the game to claim a third title. But the trophies tell only part of the story.

The rest—and there is so much of it—lives in his moments of sheer genius. In every single touch. The ball delicately lobbed over a defender before the finish in the 1958 final. The towering header in 1970 that forced Gordon Banks into one of the greatest saves in history. The dummy around the goalkeeper, letting the ball run while his body went the other way—a near-goal born from deliberately not touching the ball. That one did not even go in. Yet, even that miss earned its place in the pantheon. It takes someone truly extraordinary to leave us longing for the goals he never scored.

There was no camera in every pocket. There was no obligation to produce an immortal moment every week. There was simply a footballer finding solutions to problems others had not even managed to formulate. Wonder came before repetition. Today, we replay everything so much that, at times, we have lost the ability to be truly astonished.

Then there was the man himself—complete with contradictions, questionable choices, and notable silences. He was criticised for failing to speak out against the Brazilian military dictatorship. It is a legitimate debate. The political exploitation of his victories is also an undeniable part of history. A player's sporting greatness should never serve to erase what makes us uncomfortable about the citizen.

Yet courage should not be treated as a simple duty, prescribed from afar by those who risk nothing. It is easy to dictate the words someone else should have spoken when we are not the ones facing the consequences. Fear does not disappear simply because someone can play football. Wearing the number 10 shirt does not shield a man from a regime. We can scrutinise a silence without pretending it would have been effortless to break it.

Remembering Pelé does not require excusing everything. It requires understanding his story before casting judgment. That is also what memory is for: to prevent an entire life from being reduced to whatever convenient narrative suits the moment.

Modern life has conditioned us to this frantic pace. Chew. Swallow. Discard. Yesterday's great match already clutters tomorrow's preview. A young prospect is crowned a generational talent before there is even a generation to measure him against. One week is enough to build him up; another is enough to write him off. We crave history, but only if it happened just moments ago.

To today's players, who imagine themselves perched on a pedestal immune to the passing of time, it might be worth taking note. Followers are no guarantee of lasting legacy. The noise surrounding a name can vanish without that name ever having lost its right to be heard. If even Pelé needs someone to make room for him, today's applause offers no guarantee that tomorrow will remember us.

No one is demanding that the world come to a halt for every anniversary. All that is asked is some consistency between the eternity we proclaim and the attention we grant. A page. A conversation. A father showing a piece of skill to his child. Someone explaining why that name truly matters, rather than assuming it speaks for itself.

People die. Pelé died too. But what he achieved does not have to fade away simply for lack of someone to tell the story. Yesterday would have been his birthday. Today, there is still time.