What We Get Wrong About Pelé’s American Soccer Legacy

Of the countless obituaries that have emerged since the passing of Brazilian soccer legend Pelé at age 82 earlier this week, those from an American perspective understandably focus on his years with the New York Cosmos of the mid 1970s trying to grow the game in the United States .

Almost universally, they get Pelé’s American legacy wrong, drawing a direct line from that surreal odyssey nearly five decades ago to the stability of the US pro game today. In doing so, they re-frame his time with the Cosmos as a veritable success when in fact it was quite the opposite, serving as arguably the biggest failure of his career in terms of accomplishing the (admittedly impossible) goal of single-handedly selling most Americans on soccer.

And only is that inaccurate, it also papers over what was truly important about his time in America with respect to the sport’s growth, and what was also truly unique about the man, even compared to the rarefied air of the few dozen or so people who could ever truly call themselves global icons.

Please don’t misunderstand. This is not a criticism of the recently departed 82-year-old, who on his end did everything he possibly could have once he arrived in The Big Apple. Pelé had absolutely nothing to prove by the time he joined the Cosmos before the 1975 NASL season, having won a record three World Cups with Brazil and 10 domestic club championships with Brazil’s Santos.

Yet remarkably, he bought into the league in a competitive and commercial sense, leading the Cosmos to a title while embracing his role as the unquestionable face of the league. In the process, he proved that Americans could be sold on soccer if the version being sold was of sufficient quality, from the more than 20,000 who visited Randall’s Island for his debut to the more than 75,000 who trekked to Giants Stadium to witness his farewell two-plus years later.

Even so, the NASL folded seven short years after his retirement, despite (and possibly because) the Cosmos and others following the acquisition of Pelé to bring more high-priced stars to American and Canadian shores. And if anything, his failure to alter the league’s long-term success may have been the most important thing to happen to American soccer. Because it showed the sport’s financial backers that star power alone would not magically conjure a soccer culture capable of supporting the professional game. There needed to be a stable foundation that made fiscal and competitive sense, as there is in most pro soccer and other pro sports.

The 11 years between NASL’s collapse and the eventual launch of Major League Soccer were dark times. They might have been even darker had the United States not won its bid to host the 1994 World Cup in 1988, and had Paul Caligiuri not scored in Trinidad and Tobago to seal the USA’s place in the 1990 World Cup a year later. And when MLS finally launched in 1996 — a year later than initially planned — the league’s single-entity structure and bare-boned salary scale was a direct attempt not to revisit the strategy of high-priced imports that began with Pelé’s arrival to the Cosmos.

Early MLS probably went overboard in this regard, and as a result found itself at the verge of its own collapse in the early 2000s. But it was an easier adjustment to go from overzealous fiscal responsibility to gradually putting more resources into signing better players from abroad and developing better players at home. The league’s second and current commissioner Don Garber introduced the Designated Player Rule (Also known as the David Beckham rule) in 2007 and the Homegrown Player Rule the following year. And gradually the league meshed some of the big-picture thinking of the NASL with its early laser focus on manageable costs.

It’s uncouth to speak ill of the dead. And maybe that’s why we don’t see more people calling out Pelé’s Cosmos era as a strategic flop, albeit not one of his own fault. Yet the willingness to take such a gamble is what made Pelé remarkable even among men and women who are uniquely gifted or privileged in their own fields. A hypothetical equivalent is hard to conjure and comical to imagine: Michael Jordan finishing his basketball career in China; Barbara Streisand taking up full-time residency in Branson; Queen Elizabeth abdicating most of her monarchy to focus on Gibraltar.

Pele was above everything in the world of soccer and yet above nothing at the same time — including lending his fame to a risky, ideological business venture that ultimately failed. In the days after the end of his extraordinary life, that precious rare trait is as worth celebrating as any.