Sweden: A Star is Born

Edson Arantes do Nascimento was seventeen years old, from Bauru in São Paulo state, and had been selected for the national squad over the protests of coaches who thought him too young for the pressure of a World Cup. He had scored once in the opening matches, playing as a peripheral presence, feeling his way into the tournament. Then, against Wales in the quarter-final, he scored the only goal — a controlled chest-down and volley that suggested what was coming — and the tournament became his.

The semi-final against France produced a hat-trick in twelve second-half minutes: clinical, varied, each goal expressing a different facet of a repertoire that had no equivalent in world football. Fontaine was France's great hope that summer, a striker of genuine brilliance who would finish as the tournament's top scorer with thirteen goals; in the semi-final, Pelé was elsewhere entirely, in a register that Fontaine and no one else on the pitch could approach.

Sweden in the final were brave and organised. They scored first, and for a brief period the host nation's supporters could imagine an outcome that would have produced the most unlikely of champions. Brazil equalised quickly, then took control, then overwhelmed. Pelé's two goals — one a looping header, one a chest-and-volley combination so technically exquisite that Swedish players applauded — were both scored in the second half. Brazil won 5-2. Pelé wept on Didi's shoulder at the final whistle.

The image of the seventeen-year-old crying in triumph at the end of his first World Cup — on a Swedish pitch, in front of 49,000 Scandinavians who had come to defeat him — became one of the most reproduced in sport. It captured something real: the genuine surprise of greatness recognising itself, the almost involuntary response of a talent confronted with the first major proof of its own scale. Pelé would go on to win two more World Cups, score 1,283 goals, become the most famous sportsman in the world. It began here, in June, in the rain in Stockholm.