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RIP Pele (1940-2022)


odessasteps

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Believe it or not, my folks saw Pele live in his prime when his old club Santos played Napoli at Yankee Stadium in 1968. To hear her describe the atmosphere, they had almost 50,000 people and the whole place lost their collective minds when he scored off a header. I can't even imagine what that must've been like.

All sports have spirited debates over who the best player in history was. Soccer - none whatsoever. Said debate begins and ends at the magical feet of Pele.

Descanse em paz.

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The reason it's a debate for some is because Pele didn't play any club football in Europe. What we do have of Pele is pretty special, especially since football was much more physical and violent than it is now with all the diving and flopping.

 

RIP Pele-

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2 hours ago, Pete said:

(...)

All sports have spirited debates over who the best player in history was. Soccer - none whatsoever. Said debate begins and ends at the magical feet of Pele.

(...)

To be honest, I have rarely have seen the term "best of all time" used in regards to football at all. For one, there are too many position that are not comparable (I mean how can you even try to compare Pelé with Lev Yashin or Paolo Maldini, I suppose you run into the same issues in all team sports), plus the game has changed so much over the last century (to start with, an average professional player (depending on the position, of course) nowadays covers something like 11 to 12 km per game, in the 1960ies that number was in the 7 to 8 km range, IIRC) that I would not dare to compare a player of the same position of lets say the 1930s (it's even hard to define what a defender, a midfielder or a forward was back than considering that in current terms the teams used strategic lineups like 2-3-5) with a player of the 1960s with a player of the 1990s with a current player.

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