Pelé and the Cosmos: How the Brazilian conquered America

Ahmet Ertegun called and invited me to a testimonial dinner for Pelé that evening. I spent the rest of the day calling people to be my date ... – Andy Warhol’s Diary, Tuesday, September 27th, 1977

Before his final competitive game, the 1977 NASL Soccer Bowl at Civic Stadium in Portland, Oregon, Pelé asked every player in the dressingroom to gather around him. He then invited a motley crew of global icons and grizzled journeymen to place a hand on a tattered old practice ball he was holding. In an almost plaintive voice, he asked: “Please, please, just one more game.” Two hours later, the same squad spent an age in that same room just chanting his name as Brazilian journalists carried him shoulder-high following the New York Cosmos’ 2-1 victory over the Portland Timbers.

“God has been kind to me,” said Pelé afterwards. “Now I can die.”

As postscripts to great careers go, his American sojourn was a curious business. At one point during the Cosmos’ lengthy courtship of him, the Brazilian government was adamant the country’s most prized national asset could never leave. Knowing political intransigence had prevented the biggest European clubs from signing the player from Santos in his pomp, the Cosmos tried a different tack. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (a soccer nut) accompanied a club delegation to South America where the central thrust of his rather blunt contribution was as follows: “Listen, America has done so much for Brazil that we’d now like you to loan us Pelé.”

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It says much for the state of the professional game in America upon his arrival in 1975 that he made his debut at ramshackle Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island, New York’s worst arena. A canny groundsman spray-painted the muddier patches of the pitch green to improve the aesthetics for the television cameras beaming the match to 13 countries. An off-Broadway venue, even for a 34-year-old who hadn’t kicked a ball for eight months before signing a three-year contract worth $2.8m. The highest paid athlete in the world soon realised he had joined a rather lacklustre outfit he would struggle to immediately transform.

“‘Edson,’ I said to myself,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘I’m afraid you really are going to suffer here.’”

[ Pelé, Brazil’s World Cup winner and soccer legend, dies aged 82 ]

[ The day Pelé and Santos didn’t live up to their billing in Dalymount Park ]

[ Pelé obituary: Global superstar of football was hugely prolific goalscorer and three time World Cup winner ]

His very presence brought crowds but couldn’t guarantee success in the first two campaigns although he won League MVP in 1976. Always with a flair for the dramatic, he managed to win glory in that final season. By then, a squad of American college graduates and British journeymen (step forward one-time Halifax stalwart Tony Field) had been joined by an international assortment of legends, bringing enough star power that home games were moved to the cavernous Giants Stadium. For one encounter with the Tampa Bay Rowdies there in 1977, they drew in excess of 77,000 and won 8-3.

Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Giorgio Chinaglia were the headliners but the rest of the supporting cast was equally fascinating. Jomo Sono came from South Africa and used the money he made to bring Kentucky Fried Chicken to Soweto. Werner Roth grew up in Queens and played the German captain Baumann in Escape to Victory. Jadranko Topic was a moody Yugoslav who barely figured in the first team and eventually gained infamy as the feared leader of a hard-right Croat faction in Mostar during the Balkan conflict. Steve Hunt, a 21-year-old Brummie winger sold by hard-up Aston Villa to fund the building of a new stand, outshone Pelé and the rest when he lit up the Soccer Bowl. On a wage of $250 per week.

Assembled to help Pelé win glory, this strange bunch was presided over by Steve Ross, the ebullient and controversial chief executive of Warner Brothers, who effectively ran the team like an old-time Hollywood studio maven. When he saw Beckenbauer playing at the back on his debut, he phoned down to the dugout to bawl out the manager with the immortal advice: “Get the Kraut into midfield! We’re not paying him all that money to play dee-fence!”

During a run of poor performances, Ross took the corporate helicopter from Manhattan out to New Jersey one day, landed on the field in Giants Stadium during a training session and warned every player, including Beckenbauer and Pelé, that their jobs were on the line. When the team struggled early on in 1977, he sacked general manager Clive Toye, formerly the chief football writer of the Daily Express in London, and replaced him with Ahmet Ertegun. The Turkish-born founder of Atlantic Records, Ertegun had made his name discovering and making acts like Cream, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, The Drifters and Led Zeppelin. His only qualification was passion for the game and a knowledge of what was box office.

With so many nationalities, such outsized egos, and a fading fast 36-year-old Pelé under increasing pressure to perform miracles, the Cosmos dressing-room in 1977 was riven by jealousy and feuding. There were frequent punch-ups and the number 10 himself broke down in tears of frustration more than once. Somewhere along the way, they got their act together though, began winning games and evolved into a true sociocultural phenomenon. Tickets, once given away free with each Burger King Double Whopper meal, were suddenly prized commodities as this strange foreign game suddenly became glamorous.

[ Pelé set the standards by which footballing greatness is judged ]

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“They wore soccer shirts emblazoned with a favourite player’s name and number, T-shirts carrying such slogans as ‘soccer’s a kick in the grass’ and ‘soccer players do it for 90 minutes’,” wrote Shep Messing, the Cosmos’ Harvard-educated goalkeeper in his autobiography The Education of an American Soccer player. “They arrived with coolers, plastic ponchos, tailgate picnics, bedsheet signs and kids. Thousands of kids – who discovered the joy and freedom of a sport that required no fancy equipment, no brawn or excessive height, no boring strategies, just the ability to run and kick.

“The beautiful and the near-beautiful dropped out of the skies in corporate helicopters, while down below Jersey housewives in pink polyester suits found themselves in traffic jams getting to the games. So did pinstriped stockbrokers, large Ukrainian families, college students, bored baseball fans, the Governor of New York and the President’s son. Those of us who were there in the beginning, the mud-caked crazies who played for food-stamps and the sheer fun of it, call it a miracle. And the New Jersey Meadowlands, sunken between oil refineries and the Manhattan skyline, is our Lourdes.”

That was the Pelé effect and is the reason why Americans who know nothing about the sport even now know who Pelé is and what he represents. Because, of course, he did far more than simply win a trophy. On the morning after his testimonial game at Giants Stadium a few weeks after the Soccer Bowl triumph, the New York Times placed a photograph of a weeping Pelé on the front page next to a shot of the New York Yankees celebrating victory in the American League East. Nothing captured the rise of the sport so succinctly than the juxtaposition of old and new. As if they were now equal.

An editorial decision reflecting the magnitude of the occasion. Before watching Cosmos take on Santos and Pelé played a half for each, the sold-out crowd (Barbara Streisand, Mick Jagger, Diane Keaton and the rest of the VIP section were handed Cosmos raincoats when the heavens opened) had seen Muhammad Ali stride out to formally introduce the star of the show and assure his pal there were now, “two of the greatest”.

“I want to thank you all every single one of you,” said Pelé from a small dais. “I want to take this opportunity to ask you to pay attention to the young of the world, the children, the kids. Love is more important than what we can take in life. Everything pass. Please say with me, three times ... Love ... love ... love.”