As you may know, Pele likes to talk. Unfortunately for us, though he was the best football player ever, he speaks a lot worse than he was playing football. His latest: he says that his major contribution to football was the recognition of the black players.

Now, this is a touchy subject and I hope I will not offend anyone, as it is not my intention.

Anyway, I don’t think that Pele’s major contribution was that being black, he laid the way for others. I think the society emancipation that saw that the colour of the skin doesn’t matter did that.

More, did you ever think that Henry (which is my favorite striker) is black? Or that Bergkamp (another striker I like) is white? (it may seem like I am an Arsenal fan. I am not. I just happen to like both strikers. Not that is a bad thing to be an Arsenal fan. It’s not me). When I watch both of them, I feel like they make no effort, they just feel the ball.

I think that the most important thing in having black players in the World Cup is the globalization of football in the last 20 years. How many African teams were at the World Cup 20 years ago? In the meanwhile, we had great stories like Nigeria or Cameroon, teams that could face any European or South American team (remember that Nigeria won the Olympic Finals against a Brazil that had all their stars).

As a conclusion, I think that black players have prevailed because of their efforts, not because 40 years ago a great player was black.

Pele was a great player, but I really hope that someone teaches him not to speak without thinking.

Source: sports.yahoo.com

P.S.: I hope, for their sake, that it doesn’t happen to Brazil what happened to all the other predictions of Pele: one I can remember was that in USA 1994 Columbia was going to win and they failed miserably.