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A few months ago, it felt like most of Britain was patiently lining up on the streets of London to pay homage to the Queen.
On Monday, at the end of three days of state mourning for Pelé, the man enshrined for many of us as the greatest footballer who ever lived, Brazil turned its eyes to Vila Belmiro, a stadium in the port city of Santos, and formed its own version of the Tail to pay homage to their King.
This tail was a beautiful thing. It was a soccer tail. It was a manifestation of the legacy of joy in the game that Pelé created. People had come to mourn him and attend what had been designed as a public wake before his funeral on Tuesday, where a procession will wind through the streets past his mother’s house before a private family ceremony, but it felt like if they too had come to celebrate all that football means to them.
Thousands lined up outside the Vila Belmiro stadium in Santos to parade in front of Pelé’s coffin
It felt as if the tens of thousands who gathered here had come to celebrate the joy that Pele brought us all. They had come to celebrate the communality of soccer, their brotherhood and sisterhood, because this was a line where mothers held individual white roses and fathers wept openly as they passed Pelé’s coffin and sons crumpled their shirts on top of theirs. face to try to hide her tears. and the daughters bowed their heads.
It was a queue in which people wore the bright yellow jerseys of the Brazil national team, the jersey that, for many of us, epitomizes ‘the beautiful game’ and instantly evokes a thousand memories of Pelé at the 1970 World Cup, which it was the most brilliant flowering of his genius. This was a queue where some wore jerseys that simply bore the names of the 1958 team, which won the World Cup for Brazil for the first time. Pelé was 17 years old when that tournament started.
It was a soccer queue so people were crying but also singing. ‘Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole’, they chanted as they approached Vila Belmiro, ‘Pele, Pele’. Many wore the black and white Santos shirt. Some wore Brazilian green and gold bikinis. Some men came shirtless, with their tops tucked into their pants. Along the queue route, tributes to the only man to win three World Cups hung from buildings and doorways. ‘Obrigado, Rei’, many of them said. Thanks King.
The queue meandered a few blocks from the stadium, past open-air bars where old men lounged on stools sipping afternoon beers in the heat, one eye on the TV screen showing fans filing past Pele’s coffin, and another eye on the pool table in front of them.
Street vendors have done a brisk business selling Pelé number 10 jerseys to soccer fans.
Street vendors did a brisk business on bottled water. Alongside the wet, shallow canal that ran down the center of the main street outside the stadium, more vendors were hanging lots and lots of those yellow Brazil jerseys with a new message printed on them. ‘Pele: Eternal’, he said.
Pelé’s coffin had been brought to Santos – where his genius was first revealed to the world in 1956, where he played for 18 years and where he scored more than 1,000 goals for the club alone – in the middle of the night, received by fans on the roadside holding flares aloft and hoisting exploding fireworks as he made the drive from the Albert Einstein Israelite Hospital in Sao Paulo, where he died last week at the age of 82.
It was just after 9:30am when the coffin was carried down the sideline at Vila Belmiro by men wearing Santos tracksuits, and carefully lifted onto a pedestal in the center circle in a large open-sided tent filled with of beautiful flowers and rows of chairs. This was Pelé’s last trip on this turf where he once got past defenders and scored at will. The lid of the coffin was lifted and a thin, wispy veil was carefully and lovingly placed over Pele’s face before the first fans of the crowd, which was being corralled in the street, were allowed inside.
The stadium had become a sanctuary for Pelé. ‘Viva o Rei’, said a sign in the stands. The accent on the ‘e’ in ‘Rei’ had become a crown. ‘O Unico a Parar Una Guerra’, read another banner, ‘the only one who stopped a war’, referring to the moment when Pelé’s arrival to play a game with Santos in Nigeria had sparked a ceasefire in a civil war that was taking place there. . Markers at each end of the stadium displayed a digital image of a golden crown next to the Santos crest.
Men dressed in Santos tracksuits carried Pelé’s coffin into the stadium on Monday morning.
At the other end of the arena, overlooking the field where he had brought so much joy to so many for so long, another banner hung limp in the muggy morning heat. He made reference to young blood and Pele being eternal and then simply said: ‘Voce e Rei’. ‘You are king’. When fans were allowed into the stadium, it was the first thing they passed as they made their way to Pele’s open casket.
Outside, the crowd swelled and dignitaries began to arrive. Gianni Infantino, the FIFA president, last seen flirting with despots in Doha, was one of the first to pay his respects. While he was there, he announced that FIFA will ask all 211 confederations to name a stadium after Pelé.
The crowd outside kept growing. Some wondered if perhaps the numbers were affected by the fact that Brazilians spent much of the previous day watching Lula’s swearing in as president for a third term after his narrow defeat to his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, in the elections last month. Television news here has been split between coverage of Pelé’s death and coverage of the death of former Pope Benedict XVI.
One of the first mourners to enter the stadium was an elderly man holding a plastic replica of the World Cup above his head in one hand and a long message banner in the other. He was eager to show the sign to the hundreds of photographers, reporters and news crews, who had gathered at a booth in Vila Belmiro, to read it.
The stadium was decorated with a banner reading ‘The King’ of football who died at the age of 82.
“We lost Pele,” the sign read, “but his legacy will never be forgotten by the Brazilian people.” And he will always be eternal. Pelé will always be the best in the world. And he will never be forgotten.
The outpouring of love for Pelé seems to have been almost universal here. Current players such as Neymar, another former Santos player, have been steadfast in their support and praise for Pelé and effusive about the influence he had on them and on Brazilian soccer throughout his career when he won the World Cup in 1958, 1962 and 1970, he scored a record 77 goals for his country and became the closest thing soccer has come to a global ambassador of the game.
The closest man Pelé had to a spiritual heir in Brazilian soccer was Zico, who starred in the 1982 team that brought such joy to a new generation of fans and did his best to emulate expressive, creative and joyful soccer. from the 1970s. equipment. So it seemed appropriate to talk to him about what Pelé meant for the country.
“Every player who comes to the Brazilian team does so with a great sense of responsibility,” Zico told me recently at his soccer school in Rio de Janeiro. “Pelé took this responsibility incredibly seriously and it could be reflected in the way he helped Brazil to be recognized around the world.
‘Pele was very important to our national identity. He was an ambassador for us. I know that in England the same thing is sometimes said about Bobby Charlton, but it’s not exactly the same. Sure, sometimes people can say “oh Bobby Charlton” if you say you’re from England, but there are other things they can think of as well.
Fans have made their own tributes to say goodbye to a Brazilian cultural icon after his death.
You have the Queen, for example. Brazil has a president and foreign leaders may confuse him with other foreign leaders, but no one would mistake Pele for coming from somewhere else. Pele was Brazil and Brazil was Pele.’
That is what they expected to honor this Monday the people who were queuing in the heat in the streets around Vila Belmiro. They were paying tribute not just to the greatest soccer player that ever lived, but to someone who became the country’s cultural icon, someone whose joy in the game made people associate Brazil with beauty, happiness and success. also.
Perhaps there was a greater outpouring of grief when the great Brazilian racing driver Ayrton Senna was murdered at Imola in May 1994 than here when Pelé died, but that is partly because Senna was still a young man when he passed away and Pele had been old and frail for some time. Senna was James Dean, forever young, while Pele hadn’t kicked a soccer ball in a serious game for nearly half a century.
Despite that, his legend has lived on. And even as the world has hailed Lionel Messi for the crowning glory of winning the World Cup in Qatar with Argentina last month, Pelé’s death has reminded us all that he won the trophy three times.
That is why people also queued up in the heat on Monday. That’s why that old man wore the plastic replica of the World Cup on his head. That’s why I stood in line for two hours on Monday to pay my respects. That is why when people filed past his open coffin and turned to look at Pele, her face covered with a delicate transparent veil, many turned their heads, unable to understand that his King was dead.