The Sun, to the backdrop of three photos of Pele with Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and, rather incongruously, former England star Wayne Rooney, trumpeted 'The Greatest of All Time...He turned football into art'
A collage of British newspapers commemorating Pele, the king of football. Pics/Getty Images
News organisations across the planet hailed the legendary Brazilian, who died Thursday at the age of 82 and was widely considered the greatest footballer to ever play the game. To the Brazilian daily O Globo, Pele may have died, but he remained the “immortal king of football.” The Folha de S Paulo quoted the late Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, who said: “The difficulty, the extraordinary, is not to score 1,000 goals like Pele—it’s to score one goal like Pele.” Their obituary suggested that while Edson Arantes do Nascimento—Pele’s birth name—may have passed on, “it isn’t true that Pele is dead.”
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In Argentina—home of Diego Maradona and Lionel Messi, both also contenders for the title of greatest of all time—The Clarin remembered Pele as “a supreme symbol of football’s spectacle.” The Guardian had a touching tribute from Jorge Valdano—a teammate of Maradona’s when they lifted the 1986 World Cup trophy—who watched Pele’s exploits in the 1970 World Cup on a TV bought specially for the then 14-year-old by his mother. “Pele is an idea of perfection for me,” he told the paper. “When a television comes into the kitchen of your home, with Pele inside, that marks you for life. I cried with emotion, with happiness, because of that Brazil team.”
The Sun, to the backdrop of three photos of Pele with Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar and, rather incongruously, former England star Wayne Rooney, trumpeted “The Greatest of All Time...He turned football into art.”
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