Pelé’s shimmering legend was forged in the heat of the 1970 World Cup finals

F ootball is rarely just football and footballers are rarely just footballers. Pelé was a brilliant forward, a player of grace and imagination, of explosive pace and extraordinary balance, but that is not why his death on Thursday caused such a widespread sense of loss. Nor is it the three World Cups or the two Copa Libertadores he won. To respond to the question of why Pelé mattered with a list of attributes or medals is to miss the point: he mattered because of what he represented.

But to define what he represented is almost impossible, not least because, particularly once his playing career was over, his capacity to represent almost anything made him an advertiser’s dream. He existed in a perfect commercial space, somebody of stature and charisma who was somehow also a blank canvas, capable of promoting almost anything, from Puma to Pepsi, Viagra to diamonds made by heating his own hair under extreme pressure.

That quality means Pelé meant almost whatever anybody needed him to mean. For my generation, slightly too young to have seen him play, he was always the benchmark, the name that defined footballing greatness. “Pelé” was the player your gran who never watched football had heard of, the inevitable hero of Escape to Victory, the name that would be shouted across the schoolyard if anybody did anything especially brilliant.

And of course the name itself in that regard is hugely significant. Would we have been so keen to shout his name had he remained Edson? “Pelé” is memorable. It may be a corruption of “Bilé”, a goalkeeper Pelé idolised when he was a child (his own name supposedly derived of an incantation used by the wise women of his village as they gathered around his crib by moonlight, trying to draw him from