WATCH: When Pele came to Malta to give a training session
Thousands packed into the Empire Stadium on the Island on 16 April 1975 to watch a football event like no other.
The event was a training session for young footballers – not one that would usually win hearts. The difference to every other training session however, was the coach.
Pelé, arguably the best soccer player to ever kick a ball, was the coach for the day, giving the lucky youngsters a training session they will never forget.
Videos taken by Reuters and shared by the mayor of the Island Conrad Borg Manche show the Brazilian legend wearing a tracksuit and putting the lucky players through their paces.
He was in the country at the request of Rev. Hilary Tagliaferro, who was his friend when the Maltese priest went to Mexico to cover the 1970 FIFA World Cup – won by Pele’s Brazil.
Don Hilary interviews Pelé when he came to Malta in 1975
“The place where I lived was very close to Brazil’s training ground,” recalled Fr Hilary when asked how the friendship came about. in an interview with The Malta Independent last month.
“I made friends with an Argentinian journalist who already knew Pelé and he introduced me to him. That connection continued and I would meet him every four years at the World Cup,” he continues.
“I found out that he was, first and foremost, a very religious person. In fact he wouldn’t let me leave his hotel room until I gave him a blessing. He would kneel before me: the first time he did this, it shocked me because I saw him as an idol and then I saw him kneeling before me. He insisted that because I was a priest he wanted a blessing from me before he left,” remembers Don Hilary.
He insists, like many others, that the Brazilian was the greatest to ever play football.
Pelé was born Edson Arantes do Nascimento in the state of Sao Paolo, Brazil in 1940. His early years were the same as many footballers before him and a great number who then followed and were inspired by him: born in poverty, introduced to the game by a family member, later becoming obsessed with a sport he taught about life and gave him opportunities.
Youth team football came first, in 1953, when he signed for his local club, Bauru. But it was his first professional club, Santos, that propelled Pelé to stardom. After moving there in 1956, he played 636 matches and scored 618 goals before leaving in 1974. Not only the beating heart of the team, Pelé was also extremely loyal and of one club.
Long before the darlings of modern stars Cristiano Ronaldo or Erling Haaland, Pelé picked up a goal trail that marked him as significantly different from other players around him. Likewise, he has shown levels of skill that even today mean that some observers of the game place the Brazilian ahead of other contenders for the title of Greatest of all time: Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona.
Within a year of signing with Santos, Pelé made his debut with Brazil, three months before his 17th birthday. He scored in that game against Argentina, and 65 years later he remains the youngest scorer of the Brazilian national team.
A year later, in 1958, this young player helped his national team win the World Cup in Sweden. Then again in 1962, at the World Cup in Chile, and again at the 1970 tournament in Mexico.