Football rewards one thing above all. The team that scores more wins. The goal stands at the heart of the sport, like a sun, demolishing every argument against it. But if a single goal is the game’s highest unit, the only thing that can exceed it is the intelligence that produces many.
The cleverness that enables consistent scoring appears in one of the most replayed plays in football history—ironically, a missed chance—performed by Pelé in the 1970 World Cup semi-final against Uruguay.
The historical move, later named runaround, happened when Tostão slid a through ball up the middle, and Pelé ran onto it as Mazurkiewicz, the goalkeeper, left his line to narrow the angle. The expected thing was a touch, a shot, or a collision, but Pelé did none of it. He let the ball roll past the goalkeeper on one side and ran around the other, leaving the best keeper of the competition clutching at air. He then gathered the ball behind him and shot while turning into an open net. For a fraction, the ball incredibly slid just wide of the far post.
What unsettles me about the play is its certainty. Anyone who’s played the game knows it sometimes unfolds by chance. Typically, a fantasy player would improvise around these lucky moments, but that’s not what we see here. Pelé moves confidently, heading directly for the far side of the keeper, eyes locked on the ball—calculating quickly, more like a predator than an artist.
Pelé is credited with more than a thousand goals, and he was named Athlete of the Century with the numbers to back it up. And yet the play that shows his strange, premeditated brilliance most clearly is the one where the ball drifted wide, and the net stayed still. After all, the finest compliment a player can receive is a goal he never scored, recorded forever, just like this one.
Long Live Football. Long Live the King.
—Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Brazilian poet
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