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World Cup win a must for any GOAT contender

EDSON Arantes do Nascimento was admitted to hospital this week. And the world braced itself for some seriously bad news.

At the age of 82, cancer is testing the limits of Pele’s physical strength more than Franz Beckenbauer ever managed.

On Tuesday, the Brazilian football legend was admitted to the Albert Einstein hospital in Sao Paulo with ‘generalized swelling’, undergoing an in-depth assessment for irreversible health issues.

Daughter Kely Nascimento took to Instagram to provide reassurance that her father was in a stable condition. There was, she claimed, ‘no surprise or emergency’.

One day, of course, Pele’s legendary resilience will desert him. Time stands still for no man — not even Pele — and the time will come when the 24-hour news channels start running old images of the young prince making his debut for Brazil at the age of 16 on a loop.

We’ll see him winning his first World Cup in 1958. The glorious technicolour of Brazil’s 1970 triumph. His life as an ambassador for football in latter years. As many of his near-1,300 career goals as they can squeeze into three minutes.

And, come the saddest day for football, the debate which dogs every World Cup will then start up again.

Who, exactly, is the greatest player of all time? Who would win a vote for the GOAT?

Until he breathed his last three years ago, my old man was in no doubt. Deaf as a post for most of his adult life, they could have fracked for shale gas in his kitchen and he wouldn’t have suspected a thing.

When yours truly made the mistake of suggesting that the game was a little simpler in Pele’s day, he certainly heard that alright. The very suggestion that the great man’s goalscoring heroics were somehow invalidated by spending most of his club career in Brazil almost registered the first recorded case of death by a hearing aid chucked across the living room.

Pele, he pointed out, was forced to overcome persistent brutality in the pursuit of brilliance. Far from making him some kind of imposter, his ability to withstand crude, savage defending made him invincible.

And yet, to a new generation of fans too young to have watched him play, Pele is a distant, fuzzy relic of the past. In the debate currently raging on social media over the GOAT, he barely merits a mention.

Should Lionel Messi finally cap a sparkling career imbued with individual brilliance at club level by holding the World Cup aloft in Doha in two weeks’ time, it will rank as one of the greatest sports stories of all time. A tale worthy of a Hollywood biopic.

If Ronaldo can drag Portugal to the holy grail while clubless at the age of 37, he’ll take some serious stopping.

And yet, as things stand, neither has won so much as a single World Cup between them. Pele? He won three. And, for me, you can’t be the greatest player of all time if you’ve never held the greatest trophy.

A debate which triggers a bigger generational divide than Indyref2, opinions on this are usually influenced by one thing. Age.

To those over 60, Pele is the undisputed GOAT of choice. To those under 35, it’s unquestionably Messi or Ronaldo.

If, like me, you were born on the opening day of the 1970 World Cup finals (Mexico 0 Soviet Union 0), memories of Pele are restricted to old Panini stickers in a New York Cosmos kit. Ronaldo’s preening metrosexual egotism, meanwhile, is unappealing.

Messi? A brilliantly gifted technician, he’s more likeable than Ronaldo. Fail to win this World Cup with his last roll of the dice, however, and he won’t even be the best player Argentina has seen, never mind the rest of humanity.

Diego Armando Maradona won the World Cup single-handedly for Argentina in 1986. He dragged Napoli up by the bootstraps and restored some pride to a gritty Italian city steeped in poverty by winning two Scudettos. Starting his runs deep in the midfield, he would weave past defenders and deliver dangerously precise passes or brilliant finishes. His free-kicks were lethal.

Yes, he mixed with organised crime gangs, overcame a cocaine addiction, was sent home from the 1994 World Cup in the USA after being caught using the banned substance ephedrine and utilised the ‘hand of God’ to cheat England out of the 1986 World Cup. But nobody is perfect. And his second goal that day — a thing of beauty — offered instant redemption.

With my old dad now gone, it’s finally safe to say it. Diego Armando Maradona was a more complete footballer than Pele. And, unless Messi or Ronaldo achieve something extraordinary in Qatar, he will remain the Greatest Of All Time.

Football

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2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-03T08:00:00.0000000Z

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