If you believe a short story by Stephen King, rock’n’roll heaven is in Oregon. Elvis Presley is mayor there, Janis Joplin waiters, and Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly walk the set in a way that tends to contradict their commonly assumed deadness. Jimi Hendrix also performs every night like he’s alive, which he probably is, but only at Rock ‘n’ Roll Heaven in Oregon.
Unfortunately, it is not known how big the band is in rock heaven, whether they can handle several singers, for example, or whether Elvis has to share the microphone with Ray Charles, James Brown and Freddie Mercury. Less is known about the football team in heaven, but after the death of the larger-than-life Pelé, it should at least be certain that the starting XI for the next game will change. Pele will play.
Who is the best singer in rock history is a wonderfully pointless question if only because nobody knows how long rock history will last. The question of who the so-called GOAT in football is, the “Greatest Of All Times”, is just as refreshingly useless. Pelé’s death now rekindles that debate, and the great thing about the debate is that in the end, everyone is allowed to be right. There is no apparatus that can be used to calculate the GOAT factor. If you don’t answer the question about the best footballer of all time with “Pelé”, but with “Buffy Ettmayer” or “Jan-Gingwer Callsen-Bracker”, you can do so in the certainty that nobody will prove you wrong.
Maradona became the world champion alone in the team sport of football
The question of the best of the best is always a question of the criteria. But what criteria can you apply to someone like Pelé, whom very many today have not seen play and whose myth is told as a matter of course with the help of a few black and white snippets? After all, if you look for reliable material, you will find three world championship titles and an absurdly high number of lifetime goals scored (over 1200), which will probably put Pele out of reach forever.
However, if the ability to decide games is taken as a benchmark, the choice could just as easily fall on Diego Maradona. Maradona has done what no one before or after him has done: he became the sole world champion in team sport, even though “Argentina” was officially engraved on the 1986 World Cup. In the case of his compatriot Lionel Messi, the club player’s consistent genius has so far been considered worthy of recognition, but recent triumphs in his national team’s shirt (Copa America 2021, World Cup 2022) also make Messi a serious GOAT candidate. His eternal rival Cristiano Ronaldo? Anyone who caught him crying after Portugal’s World Cup defeat in Qatar could appreciate how much such players associate their posthumous glory with major titles. CR7 may have been European champion once, but he himself obviously assumes that he would have needed another World Cup to take the place in the GOAT ranking that he himself considers appropriate (everything between first and first). And Cristiano Ronaldo also suspects that his abdominal muscles are a good distinguishing feature to the Brazilian original Ronaldo, whose abdominal muscles are a bit plump. But they’re hardly enough to offset Pelé’s 1,200 goals, Maradona’s divine inspiration or Messi’s newfound perfection.
Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Gerd Müller or Xavi/Iniesta: Which criteria count?
Will Pelé leave behind more for posterity than just the memory of his art? If you want to honor a player’s legacy in addition to the pure quality, you could also come to the Dutchman Johan Cruyff, who gave football the philosophy of “total play” that is still practiced to this day, or to Franz Beckenbauer, who, passing twice, was the libero invented. When it comes to standing for something, Gerd Müller also comes to mind, who came as close to the meaning of the game (= goals) as hardly anyone before or since. If you want to award footballers who have been programmed by the computer to be flawless, you will end up with Philipp Lahm. The duo Xavi/Iniesta stands for the modesty with which an era can be shaped. The Brazilian Sócrates was a pediatrician, chain smoker and fighter for democracy.
And what about Zidane, Platini and van Basten, with di Stefano, Garrincha, Puskas or Bobby Charlton? Whether they rank fifth on the GOAT list or closer to 17 also depends on the jury you’re polling (the juror Zlatan Ibrahimovic would always vote for Zlatan Ibrahimovic). When Pelé was once asked to name his all-time top ten, he named defender Giovanni Trapattoni among others.