How Pele's 1977 prediction came true

There were 12 negatives but 18 positives in signing for New York Cosmos, Pele was told.

- Dhiman Sarkar

Helping him get out of a financial mess and the USA being the world’s largest market were two of the latter. On June 11, 1975 at 21 Club, one of New York's most famous addresses before it shuttered in 2020, Cosmos announced Pele as their own.

The media conference ended with Pele, speaking through a translator, saying he hoped to “make this game...as important a sport here as it is in the rest of the world.” Recounting his passage to USA in his autobiography, “My Life And The Beautiful Game”, Pele says by 1977, also the year he came to Kolkata with Cosmos to play Mohun Bagan, he felt “the success of soccer in United States is inevitable.”

Nearly 50 years later, 70,492 at a Los Angeles stadium watched USA do what they have never done in a World Cup: score four goals in one match. Folarin Balogun did a first in 96 years, getting more than one goal in a match since Bert Patenaude's hattrick against - you couldn't make this up - Paraguay.

Football's not the No.1 sport in some countries, among them USA where it is eclipsed by gridiron football, baseball and basketball. In the Gold Cup final last year, there were more Mexicans in the stands against USA in Houston. And more than a fair sprinkling of Guatemalans in the semi-final in St Louis against the home team.