`In a way Brazil ruined it for all of us. They had revealed a kind of Platonic ideal that nobody, not even the Brazilians themselves, would ever be able to find again," wrote Nick Hornby of the team that won the 1970 World Cup. In a way, perhaps they did. But what a way: those Brazilian flicks, feints, dribbles, telepathic passes, swerving cannonball shots and sublime shimmies still shimmer in the imagination. There was a seal-like silkiness to their skills and an elemental rhythm to their play.
We are unlikely to see such exquisite football again. Pele, the sublime team's star of stars, recently turned 60. He laments the demise of what Brazilians call futebol arte and the tabloids call "samba soccer". And he fears - because professional football's ideals have clearly become economic, not Platonic - that the sport itself faces ruin. Institutional greed, he thinks, is killing the game. "If the commercial side wins the battle, the players and fans will be the big losers," he said last year.
It's an old argument, this "battle" for the spirit of football. Clearly, Pele has a point but we must, of course, be wary of old pros claiming theirs was a Golden Age. Much about football - stadiums, pitches, equipment, fitness, TV coverage, anything that money can buy - is better now that it was 30 years ago. Euro 2000 was rightly regarded as a splendid tournament football-wise - so the game is certainly not yet lost. But the price of pragmatism is invariably the death of romance and big-time football is undeniably less romantic now.
"Fitness and strength," argues Johann Cruyff, have muscled out much "skill and subtlety". Diet, weights and even drugs can make for more effective players but, ironically, a less entertaining game. Certainly, the multi-millionaire stars of today are a different breed from the Brazilians of legend. Back in 1958, when Brazil won its first World Cup and Pele, at 17, scored twice in the 5-2 final win against hosts Sweden, medical check-ups revealed that many of the winning squad's players were woefully unhealthy.
Most of them, in fact, had worms, many were anaemic and one even had syphilis. These were lads, who, in general, had learned to play football (and obviously, in at least one case, other games besides) in poverty. Though their street play has been romanticised - for poverty is brutally unromantic - they did acquire alley-cat smartness (as well as alley-cat illhealth) which a pampered puss can never learn. "The 1970 team was a better team but the team of 1958 had better individuals," Pele has since said.
And there you can see the trajectory of Brazilian - and even much of world - football. In and around 1970, the blend of street-game individuality and trainingpitch teamwork appears to have struck its ideal balance, fusing imagination and discipline. Plato's pupil, Aristotle ("Every virtue is a mean between two extremes") would have approved. Since then, as Hornby suggested, nobody has ever been quite able to find that ideal again. The moment passed in a blur of images from the football stadiums of Mexico.
Brazil won a fourth World Cup in 1994 but with a functional team scarcely fit to lace the boots of the country's 1982 "losers", which included the magnificent Zico, Falcao and, funnily enough, Socrates. Now Brazil exports footballers like livestock because 98 per cent of them can earn only £90 a month (the legal minimum salary) at home. Almost 700 leave every year and not all go to the leagues of the wealthy European powers, although, in 1999, Germany, in signing 137 and Portugal (136), were the top destinations.
Some, however, play in such football hotbeds as Iceland, India and Indonesia and not surprisingly, many never adapt. Cheap to buy, almost half are returned back to Brazil within a year. Still, in all, they now play in 61 foreign countries. In fact, there are more Brazilians in this season's European Champions' League squads than there are Englishmen - 41 as against 40. In 1960, when Juventus tried to buy Pele from Santos, they were told he was "a non-exportable national treasure". Little wonder he fears for Brazilian football and blames its demise on domestic political corruption and international commercialisation.
Brazil's leagues (they have many) are a mess. Rio's Maracana Stadium, the home of futebol arte and football passion, is a crumbling slum. Even the myth of Brazil as a racial democracy (boosted worldwide because of the on-field harmony of its great national teams, which have always fielded black, brown and white players) is in tatters. Race, not just cross-colour class - which always sounded suspiciously too textbook Marxist - is a major fault-line. It's not apartheid South Africa but it's no model either: blacks remain the poorest and die youngest.
Less than four weeks after Derry's Bloody Sunday and the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin, Pele played in Dalymount Park. His club, Santos, scored two late goals to beat a Bohemians/ Drumcondra selection 3-2. There was no Manchester United superstore in Dublin then. In fact, there was no Manchester United superstore in Manchester then. There was almost no live football on television in those years and you'd never see people in the street wearing football shirts(then generally called "jerseys"). Scarves yes, but never shirts.
Nonetheless, the magical name - Pele - packed Dalymount on a Saturday in late February, 1972. He had what euphemistically used to be termed "a quiet game". He didn't score and just a couple of times produced deft touches but nothing especially exuberant or extravagant. He was, anyway, approaching 32 and it was his 1,080th professional game. Even the crowd understood why he didn't really want to get stuck-in in Phibsboro. He would play on for a further five years, almost equally divided between Santos and New York Cosmos, where he could make - by the standards of the time - serious money.
NOW that he is 60, has played in three World Cup winning teams (though he missed most of the 1962 tournament through injury, when Garrincha, the ultimate alley-cat, who would die as a street alcoholic, was the star of stars) and has been Brazil's sports minister, Pele is slipping into history. Few people under 40 remember him at his best. Yet, along with just a handful of others, his name always arises when talk turns to the futile if, given the right circumstances, oddly intriguing notion of "the best player of all time". Whatever your view, he was certainly the best player in the best team of all time.
As such, he remains the exemplar of a kind of football which has vanished - at least from the great stadiums - and which will not return. "It's the quickness of mind that is most important," he has said. Though a shade under 5 ft 8 inches, Pele had power, speed, imagination, vision, composure and, of course, an almost flawless relationship with the ball. Those gifts made him one of the most famous people of the 20th century. When it came to football, he wasn't merely reading the game - he was writing it - even if his biro did run dry on that February day in Phibsboro.
Last Monday's Internet poll for "The Player of the Century" resulted in a draw between Pele and Maradona. Pele supporters rightly argued that because of the average age of Internet users, few remember him in his prime. This is true. Maradona, another magnificent talent, was greatly favoured because he is 20 years younger. Maradona drove an otherwise modest Argentina to World Cup victory in 1986. But his own superb performances aside, Argentina were not a thrilling team. They were pedestrian compared with Brazil's hypnotic 1970 side which, alongside Pele, included Gerson, Rivelino, Jairzinho, Tostao and Carlos Alberto.
But are Pele's fears about commercialism ruining football well-founded? Isn't the game thriving? Perhaps he is being too simplistic. "The link between sterile football and commercialism is not valid," says Eamon Dunphy, an inveterate Pele admirer. Dunphy remains "optimistic about the future of the game on the field". Euro 2000 bears him out. "It did seem throughout the 1980s and in the 1990 World Cup that the battle between the artists and the technocrats for the soul of football had been won by the technocrats. But more recently a smarter generation of coaches has let good players play."
Although he acknowledges that "television is the big danger", Dunphy contends that because, given their wealth, the best players of today "will not fear the sack" when they become coaches, they will be imaginative. Hence his optimism. "Nike bought Brazilian football," he says, "and Pele knows all about that."
We all know all about that and about the ill Ronaldo, hardly seeing the game, never mind reading or writing it, when France thrashed Brazil 3-0 to win the 1998 World Cup final.
Forging connections between societies and the football they produce - exuberant Brazilians, cynical Uruguayans, macho Argentinians, dour Scandinavians methodical Germans, liberal Dutch, bulldog English, cut-throat Italians, fiery Irish, gifted but undisciplined Africans and so forth - make for national stereotypes. Clearly, there are dangers in taking such mental shorthand too literally or seriously. Prejudices can be irrationally "confirmed" and often prejudice reveals more about the stereotyper than the stereotyped.
Yet, for all that, the exuberant Brazilians of the Pele era - from 1958 and peaking in 1970 - are rightly believed to have constituted the high point of 20thcentury football. Whether or not the 20th century will be the high point of football is another matter. In future, the game will be different. Power and stamina will be de rigueur (given France's current pre-eminence, the French phrase seems appropriate). It will not be futebol arte but that doesn't mean it will be artless football.
The new century will produce new heroes and villains. New styles of play will develop in emerging countries and the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Korea could be fascinating. Japan, some commentators believe, could be realistic dark horses (or dark Shetland ponies, perhaps). We'll see. Like movements in literature, painting or other arts, the results cannot be disconnected from the times which produced them. So it is with Brazilian football. It may be as great again; but it will never be the same again. Its romantic era has passed.