Pelé, the 1970 World Cup, and what one man's game meant to a country — and to my family.
I was born and raised in Miami, but almost everyone in my family is from Brazil, and there are certain names you grow up hearing spoken with a different tone of voice than any other name gets. Pelé was one of them. Not "the soccer player." Just Pelé — said the way you'd say the name of somebody who belonged to everyone in the room at once.
By the time Brazil won the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, Pelé was already on his third title with the national team, which is a genuinely absurd thing for one player to be part of. That win let Brazil keep the Jules Rimet trophy permanently, and the team that got them there is still talked about as one of the most beautiful sides to ever play the game — total commitment to attacking, flair over caution, joy as a style of play rather than just a result of winning. Pelé was the center of that, the reason casual fans and serious tacticians could agree on the same thing at the same time.
What makes that moment more than a highlight reel, though, is the country it happened in. Brazil in 1970 was several years into a military dictatorship — a period of real censorship and real repression that touched everything from newsrooms to universities. And in the middle of that, here was a Black man from a poor background in Minas Gerais, becoming the single most beloved figure in the country, the one thing practically everyone, regardless of politics, could point to and feel proud of at the exact same moment.
That's a strange kind of power to hold, and historians still argue about what Pelé did with it. The regime was more than happy to wrap itself in the good feeling of that World Cup win, using the moment for its own image the way governments tend to do with a beloved champion. Pelé himself has been criticized over the years for not using his platform to speak out against the dictatorship the way some other public figures did. I think both things can be true at once: that his silence has fair critics, and that what he gave people on the field was still real. For ninety minutes at a time, a country that couldn't agree on much of anything could agree that what they were watching was beautiful. That's not nothing, even if it's not everything.
I think about that tension a lot, actually, in a completely different context — advertising. A campaign, a jersey, a walk-out song can unite people around a feeling without fixing a single one of the real problems sitting underneath it. That doesn't make the feeling fake. It just means you have to be honest about what a moment of unity can and can't do. Pelé gave Brazil the "can" part, generously, for decades. The "can't" part was never really his to fix alone.
Pelé died in December of 2022, and I remember the way it landed in my house — less like news about a stranger and more like something closer to family news. My relatives who lived through the years he played talked about him like he'd personally given them something, and in a way he had: a reason to believe their country was capable of greatness, even while plenty else was going wrong around them. That got passed down to me the way family stories do, secondhand but somehow still vivid, and it's part of why I can't watch a soccer match, hear a Brazilian song, or even lace up a pair of cleats without feeling like I'm plugged into something bigger than the game itself. That's the inheritance. I never saw him play live, and I still feel like I did.
Further reading: The Athletic, on how Brazil won the 1970 World Cup.