From Pelé to Pussy Riot and Palestine: How satellites turned the World Cup into humanity’s mostly common shared experience
Most of the world adored Pelé, but never saw him in live action — even on TV. His greatness traveled via highlight reels, long after the game. But technology has shrunk our world and compressed time
You know Edson Arantes de Nascimento by his futebol nomme d’guerre, “Pelé”. And you’ve probably heard that he was proclaimed as the game’s G.O.A.T long before Messi and Ronaldo were born. What’s remarkable about the comparison, though, is how little the world’s football fans had seen of him in real-time action by the time that accolade became conventional wisdom. And in that distinction, something remarkable about how humanity’s relationship to football has evolved with globalization and technology.
Pelé burst onto the scene at age 17 in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. But only one of Brazil’s games – their triumph over Sweden in the final – was televised live. And that was in a grainy black-and-white broadcast beamed only as far a handful of television sets in some parts of Europe. It was in the newsreel highlight films of his first World Cup that people may have gotten a glimpse of Pelé’s sublime skills, but certainly not in his club football day job with Santos in Brazil. And 1959 was the only time he featured for Brazil in the Copa America, and it seems that was captured mostly on newsreel film like this.
The wider world would have to wait four years at a time to catch a glimpse of the player deemed the greatest of his time, and even then, only sparingly. At the 1962 tournament in Chile, he played only one full game before suffering an injury that kept him out for the remainder of the tournament – also not globally televised.
The 1966 World Cup Final was the first broadcast live across countries and continents, enabled by the new technology of orbiting communications satellites — and watched by an estimated 400m people, the largest ever TV audience for a single event until that point. It was televised in black-and-white, of course, which is why England wore their red away shirt having lost the toss to wear their first-choice white strip (to Germany, whose shirts were also white) – and the need for contrast in monochrome video requiring a color that didn’t read as lighter.
Pelé’s fortunes in 1966 though, were shaped by the brutal fouling that routinely targeted ball-players in the era before the yellow card was introduced to the game in 1970. Pelé was repeatedly fouled in the opening game against Bulgaria, forcing him out of the next fixture against Hungary, and then turning out with a knee injury against Portugal whose defenders kicked him out of the game.
So, it really wasn’t until 1970, the first tournament televised in color, complete with multiple camera angles and extensive use of slo-mo replays, that something approaching today’s experience of watching a World Cup first appeared. Brazil, thrashed Italy 4-1, in what would be Pelé’s final World Cup.
After that, it was back to Santos – and Brazilian league games weren’t globally televised – and then in a de facto retirement from top-level football, he moved to the New York Cosmos in 1975. He had retired from the national team in 1971, and declined to return to the selecao for the 1974 tournament – a decision he much later claimed was a protest against Brazil’s U.S.-backed military dictatorship.
So, the glorious color-TV spectacle of the 1970 final, which was beamed live to hundreds of millions of viewers around the world, was probably the only time most of those who proclaimed him the king of football had ever had the opportunity to watch him in real-time action.
It’s pretty safe to say Pelé’s reputation was cemented by newsreels and promotional films – like the one below, which was shown in a darkened hall at my high school in 1975, probably as part of a Pepsi marketing campaign.
Compare that to today’s reality, were every exceptionally talented Brazilian teenager is already known to tens of millions of fans around the world watching YouTube clips, and will more than likely have been playing in a European elite league since before he turned 20 – think Vini Jr., Rodrygo and Endrick at Real, Estevao at Chelsea, Savinho at City or Arsenal’s Gabriel Martinelli, and many more.
Thus the globalization of club football, the quotidian form of the game that sustains us between World Cups, and which accelerated sharply after Falcao, Zico and Socrates followed their 1982 World Cup heroics by moving to Italy’s Serie A. Pelé and his 1970 teammates all earned their wages at Brazilian clubs; 85% of Brazil’s 2022 in Qatar played their club football in Europe — where the money, and therefore, the top talent are centered.
In the recent era when Messi and Ronaldo were framed as competing for the G.O.A.T. title, hundreds of millions of fans around the world would watch them play live not only during the quadrennial World Cup tournaments, but once or twice a week in the English Premier League, La Liga and the European Champion’s League as Ronaldo represented Manchester United and then Real Madrid, while Messi shone for Barcelona and then PSG.
They were the kings of replica merchandize, each generating hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of their club shirts, not because the hundreds of thousands of fans who bought those shirts had ever been inside the stadium to watch them play, but because of the live broadcasts of their club games via satellite television. The average global TV audience for a Champions League game is around 145 million, and three times as many watch that competition’s final. The English Premier League estimates that some 1.8 billion people worldwide interact with its content at least once a week.
The World Cup will generate $4.2 billion for FIFA in the sale of the broadcast rights. It’s the largest single source of profit for the tournament, as it is for club football — the fee for the global TV rights to broadcast the English Premier League is close to $9 billion over three years, while the European Champions League generates some $3.5 billion a year. No surprise that both the English Premier League and the European Champions league are now weighing launching proprietary direct-to-consumer subscription streaming platforms with an eye to cashing in on the demand their product creates.
The World Cup’s technological compression of time and space also puts hundreds of millions of people around the world into direct conversation, in the way that a crowd inside a stadium might be. The 2022 final match generated 25 million Whatsapp messages per second and 24,000 tweets per second; overall that tournament generated 6 billion social media interactions.
Football’s evolution as a global spectacle, from Pelé on newsreels to the hand-held intimacy of Vinicius Jr. live on millions of phone feeds, has created a shared, real-time global experience of unprecedented scale in human history. And, the moment during the 2018 final, the triumph of presiding over such a moment by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was disrupted by a guerrilla-theater protest action by the dissident performance-art troupe Pussy Riot, reminded us of both the perils, and the possibilities of the global football spectacle.
Indeed, the Morocco players who brandished the Palestinian flag to celebrate their historic quarterfinal victory over Spain at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar smashed their way through FIFA’s ugly silence over Israel’s violent regime of occupation over Palestinians. They were on the field, in front of cameras streaming to the five continents, and beyond the reach of both FIFA officialdom and whatever minders their own government had sent along — Morocco, remember, was one of just four signatories to the “Abraham Accords,” a concoction of the Trump Administration to normalize Arab ties with Israel on the assumption that Arab autocrats could legitimize Israeli apartheid. The heroes of their unprecedented World Cup success dissented — using one of the most powerful platforms available; international football’s real-time reach onto billions of digital devices across the platform. It’s not hard to imagine that will have been the last such display.
