Pele planted the seed, and American soccer bloomed

The Brazilian who is known as the world's essential player died Thurday

New York City FC is building a stadium. It will be ready in 2027, seating 25,000 or so, to follow the model of other Major League Soccer venues that are tailored for the world obsession that occasionally masquerades as a sport.

It will go up near CitiField, home of the Mets, and the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open. Residences and shops will surround it. The price tag is assumed to be $750 million, to start.

Three-quarters of a billion dollars to build a place to watch soccer in the U.S. of A….just imagine how Edson Arantes do Nascimento reacted. when the news came down in late November. It is hoped he was cogent enough to flash the world’s most famous smile.

Pele died on Thursday, at age 82, from the effects of colon cancer. He is the only player in history to win three World Cups, and at 17 he was the youngest player ever to score a World Cup goal. He will be remembered for that and a million other things, but here he’ll be known as the midwife of American soccer, which overcame a troubled adolescence to grow up handsomely.

Pele had already retired, for the most part, when he came to the U.S., and he didn’t do it to inspire American kids, at least not initially. He did it because he was bankrupt, because his investments had fizzled. Should he have left Santos, his club team in Brazil, instead of turning down constant offers to play professionally in whatever nation he chose? It was a decision he never regretted or second-guessed, but reality was calling, and the New York Cosmos, run by music and movie executives who envisioned a witches’ brew of Studio 54, rock and roll and superstar soccer, gave him a $7 million contract over three years. No other athlete in the world was makng such money.

Pele and the Cosmos won the 1977 North American Soccer League championship, and he left after that, although he did play a farewell exhibition in Giants Stadium in which he played one half for the Cosmos and the other half for Santos. It rained during the game, and a Brazilian newspaper said it meant that “even the sky was crying.”

His personal stats weren’t the story, even though he scored 17 goals in that title year. More significantly, the Cosmos-Santos game drew 75,000, and a playoff game with Fort Lauderdale drew 77,691 on 1977. Cosmos regular season average attendance peaked at 47,856 in 1977, and Giorgio Chinaglia and Carlos Alberto and Franz Beckenbauer were on board by then.

And, no, the Cosmos players were not hard to find after midnight. “We were bigger than the Yankees and the Giants,” goalkeeper Shep Messing said.

“Saying you had partied with Pele was the biggest badge of honor going,” said Arsenal fan Mick Jagger.

It is hard to draw a straight line between those days and today, because the NASL went out of business after the super seniors left. There was a 12-year gap before MLS came along. Still, the numbers are hard to deny and would have been harder for Pele to comprehend. The top two teams in attendance this year were Atlanta and Charlotte, averaging 47,116 and 35,260. Charlotte FC played its inaugural game in front of 74,779 in Bank of America stadium, selling seats that the Panthers usually can’t.

The two Los Angeles teams combined to draw nearly 45,000 per match. Overall, MLS crowds broke the 10 million mark, a rousing increase over the pre-COVID record of 8.9 million.

Nashville is building a soccer park to the tune of $335 million and why not? Its MLS club ranked fourth in attendance. Who knew that soccer would thrive in SEC country? Did people show up because they actually thought it was football?

The truth was around us all along. It was in the sprawling soccer complexes that popped up beside the freeways, the ones with full parking lots on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and every field occupied. It was at home, when you realized your teenagers could recite the starting lineup of Chelsea or Manchester United, and couldn’t name more than five New York Yankees. It was in the Rose Bowl, where midsummer visits from Barcalona sold out the joint.

The American Youth Soccer Organization (AYSO) says it had over 630,000 players in 2011. More than 12.56 million Americans played soccer outdoors at least once, which was actually down from 13.26 million in 2013.

Yet some people, in kneejerk fashion, still wonder when soccer is going to “make it” in America, as almost every other sport is losing its appeal. Much of that comes from the international competitions. The women have ruled the game globally, but the men haven’t and their failure to advance to the Final 16 was consideered a disappointment. But England hasn’t won the World Cup since 1966 and the Netherlands never has. Germany didn’t get out of group play this year.

It is very much a bottom-up phenomenon, but Pele was the first to put the game on American magazine covers and on regular television. He sold soccer balls and nets in the big-lot stores. He got parents motivated to share the game with their kids. He had nothing to do with Title IX and the mushrooming of women’s college soccer that led to Mia Hamm and Michelle Akers and Julie Foudy and all of that. But he used the American fascnation with celebrty to plant the seed.

When someone mentioned to Pele that he was as well-known as Jesus Christ, he replied that he’d been to some places where Jesus wasn’t known at all. The man who helped broker his arrival in American was Henry Kissinger. The Shah of Iran once waited three hours to meet him. King Gustav IV of Sweden came down from the stands to congratulate Pele one day. Well, not just any day. Pele had brilliantly beaten Sweden in the World Cup, which was played in Sweden.

Messing remembered the day Muhammad Ali came into the Cosmos locker rooom, after waving to a beseeching crowd. “As soon as he saw Pele he was like a star-struck child,” Messing said.

“The moment the ball arrived at his feet,” said Pier Paolo Pasolini, the director, “football turned into poetry.”

By all accounts, Pele handled the hero game with constant grace and, sometimes, amazing gestures. He once visited Greenville, S.C., and sportswriter Mike Hembree wrote a story. Hembree’s mailbox soon welcomed an envelope that contained the clipping, complete with Pele’s autograph.

That signature is all around us.