Tostão picks up the loose ball and nudges it back to Wilson Piazza just outside his own box. The ball is moved in a slow triangle through Clodoaldo to Pelé and Gérson and back to Clodoaldo. His touch is slightly heavy, enticing an Italian challenge. Clodoaldo skips round him and then two other tackles. He sidesteps Antonio Juliano and rolls the ball to Rivellino on the left. Rivellino sweeps a 40-yard pass down the line to Jairzinho and the rhythm has suddenly changed.
Jairzinho runs at Giacinto Facchetti and, as he turns inside, Pierluigi Cera advances to close him down. Jairzinho pokes the ball on to Pelé, perhaps 27 or 28 yards out. Tarcisio Burgnich stands between him and the box, but Pelé pauses, turns casually to his right and lays a pass into the path of Carlos Alberto, surging forward from full-back. Just inside the box the ball bobbles so it sits up perfectly. Carlos Alberto doesn’t have to break stride as he lashes a shot hard across goal, the force of the strike lifting him high off the ground as the ball flies into the bottom corner. With four minutes of the 1970 World Cup final remaining, Brazil lead 4–1.
For many, it’s the greatest goal scored by perhaps the greatest team in the greatest World Cup, a glorious synthesis of team play and individual technical excellence. Yes, it came right at the end of the final and Italy were exhausted by then, accepting their defeat, but it was a goal that encapsulated the joy and virtuosity of that side, that left the world with a shorthand for what the Brazil of 1970 meant.
And if by the time it was scored it was almost a goal without an opposition, an exhibition, that felt appropriate too, for Brazil by then had come to feel as though they were about more than games or results, more even than winning the World Cup: they were about an expression of football in its most beautiful form, about pushing the boundaries of human capability.
The impact of Brazil’s victory on the global imagination was profound. This felt thrillingly modern. For those who had colour television, who witnessed those vibrant yellow shirts and the shorts of cobalt blue playing with a dash and a verve in iridescent heat on the sun-bleached grass of Mexico, the impact is hard to overstate.
The tournament revelled in the sense of progress, naming the official ball the Telstar, after the satellite that made live global transmission possible. And Brazil, after all, had undergone a Nasa-approved training course before the World Cup. When the Jornal do Brasil claimed that “Brazil’s victory with the ball compares with the conquest of the moon by the Americans” the previous year it didn’t seem ridiculous.
Just as the moon landing could be regarded as a triumph of human ingenuity, so Brazil’s artistry seemed to transcend the tournament, the petty squabble of nation against nation. Much of what posterity has remembered of Pelé in that tournament – the lob from the halfway line against Czechoslovakia, the header that drew the stunning save from Gordon Banks, the dummy on the Uruguay goalkeeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz in the semi-final – didn’t lead to goals, as though this was about more than the bureaucracy of the scoreboard; it was about the greater glory of the game.
Ever since, there has been a sense of football trying to recapture the spirit of 1970, that feeling of rapturous and perhaps impossible excitement. By the time of the 1974 tournament in West Germany, João Havelange had been elected president of Fifa and a new age of commercialism had begun.
It’s not to present Stanley Rous’s tenure as Fifa president as anything other than flawed to suggest that, when a former schoolteacher was replaced by the son of an arms dealer, a certain financial innocence was lost. The 1970 World Cup looks different to every subsequent World Cup because not every surface is covered in advertising. The marketing was not slick, the presentation imperfect, and in that ramshackle aspect there was perhaps a charm: the football, by and large, came first.
And the football in 1970 was thrilling. The contrast to the physicality of the two previous World Cups and England’s cautious, mechanistic win in 1966 was obvious and for many those two facets became fused: this tournament was modernity and it had been won by Brazilian artistry, therefore such artistry was modern. But it was not. It had been made possible by the heat and altitude of Mexico that, with the fitness of players as it then was, effectively made pressing impossible. By 1974 in West Germany, pressing was back.
Brazil’s World Cup victory in 1970 still has a mythic quality, their performance still used as a shorthand for the best that football can be: it’s what gave Pelé’s “beautiful game” cliche currency. That it became fused in the popular imagination with the technology that made it possible to witness the tournament live across the globe is natural: the Telstar was both satellite and ball, ball and satellite, and Brazil’s mastery over one was disseminated by the other. Their attacking football was brilliant, but this was a tournament just as tawdry, just as mired in political chicanery, and just as blighted by poor refereeing as any other.
The aptest analogy for the 1970 World Cup from the previous year, then, is perhaps less the moon landings than Woodstock, a festival of love and artistry that has come to embody a moment of lost possibility. Like Woodstock, the future offered by the 1970 World Cup was perhaps always implausible.
The popular conception of Woodstock – great crowds high on the prospect of peace and love, listening to Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Joan Baez – stems largely from the over-idealised Michael Wadleigh documentary, released three months before the 1970 World Cup. The reality was chaos: several acts performed hours late; a fence was broken down by anarchists leading to potentially dangerous overcrowding; two people were killed, one of them run over by a tractor; and a worn electric cable combined with persistent rain raised the possibility of mass electrocution.
The 1970 World Cup, similarly, once you peer beyond the brilliance of Brazil’s football, becomes a much more sinister event. Mexico’s governing PRI was repressive and capable of extreme violence. And in Brazil, along with short-term economic growth, victory in Mexico, and its associated modernity, was presented as part of President Emílio Garrastazu Médici’s “Brazilian miracle”.
The result is that the 1970 World Cup stands amid the darkness as a fragile vision of perfection and possibility, of what football can be, what it could have been. It is, in effect, the equivalent of that epiphanic pause before Pelé lays the ball right in the 86th minute of the final. But where that pass was followed by the explosive fulfilment of Carlos Alberto’s shot, football itself went awry. That World Cup is the scene in Easy Rider, another cultural touchstone of 1969, in which Wyatt (Peter Fonda) tells Billy (Dennis Hopper): “We blew it.”
Like Wyatt and Billy, Fifa took the money and, while much was gained, much also was lost.
This is an edited extract from The Power and the Glory: A New History of the World Cup by Jonathan Wilson, published by Abacus, £25. To order a copy for £22.50 go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
