Pelé is dead: we remember him with three unpublished moments

His skills as a goalscorer are very well known: a hundred goals he scored with his head, about four hundred with his left foot, the rest that allowed him to go over a thousand goals he scored with his right foot. Less known, however, his skills in between the posts. No, you didn’t read wrong. Pelé happened to play several times, if necessary, in the goalkeeper role. On four occasions these were even official matches: in 1959, 1969, 1973 and, above all, 1963. The latter, in fact, is the one that Santos fans have remembered most fondly for all these years. The circumstance was the semi-final of the Brazilian Cup, between Santos of Pelé and the Gremio of Porto Algre: the match came to an end with the result of 4-3 in favor of Santos, thanks to a hat-trick by Pelé. Obviously. In the 86th minute, however, the legendary goalkeeper of Sanstos, Gilmar, was sent off and – the substitutions having ended – “0’Rei” who occasionally covered the role of goalkeeper during training decided to play on goal for the last tense minutes of that match. There are no video testimonies of that match, but it is said that in the final Pelé also made two precious saves which allowed Santos to reach the final of the tournament, which he would later win.

The legend of the “Ceasefire” during the Nigerian War

One of the most famous legends that have fueled Pelé’s fame in the world concerns the one born in the late sixties and linked to the visit of his Santos in Nigeria, a country devastated by the Biafra war of secession, with over a million dead. According to various stories, as soon as the news that the footballer could play a match there was made public, a “Ceasefire” was announced.

The armistice would last 48 hours to allow everyone to watch the match in peace. However, while many sources testify to the real dispute over the friendly match between Santos and the Nigerian national team (for the record 2-2, with Pelé’s brace), there are more doubts about stopping the conflict. Many international newspapers have reported on this story, but there is no confirmation from the Nigerian press of an effective armistice. To create further confusion on this case, it was probably Pelé himself who in his 1977 autobiography, “My Life and the Beautiful Game”he said he had visited Lagos but in January 1967 and not 1969 (when the Nigerian civil war had not yet broken out). In those years Pelé’s Santos often traveled around the world and probably this could have led him to commit this gross error, which was also repeated in a subsequent interview with CNN in 2011. According to the Santos historian, Guilherme Guarchethe source of the complete 1969 ceasefire is from refer to a 1990 articleappeared in the magazine ‘placar’ to signature Michelle Laurence, French-Brazilian journalist. However, the sources available today do not provide evidence on the actual laying down of weapons on match day.

The never-before-seen goal reconstructed with an animation

According to Pele himself, his most beautiful goal has disappeared. He had made it on August 2, 1959 in the match between San Paolo and the Clube Atletico Juventus at the Rua Javari Stadium. No camera filmed the spectacular action of the Brazilian champion who, with real magic, created four “sombreros” for defenders and goalkeepers to then score with a header into an empty net. It was Pelé himself who asked a group of computer football enthusiasts to reconstruct that incredible goal thanks to computer-generated animation. The 12-second footage was included in the documentary “Pelé the athlete of the century”: all parts of his body were filmed with a camera and all his movements were recorded with sensors. Thus the image of the player was reproduced in three dimensions and then, thanks to the computer, the simulation of the action of the champion who is already a legend was created.