Focus on school, club football: Pele

kolkata, October 12

Legendary Pele today offered a solution to bring Indian football out of its current abyss, saying that the game should be made an integral part of growing up for kids here besides ensuring maximum foreign exposure to the promising players.

Pele addressed his first news conference in Kolkata during his one-week sojourn in India. Without delving deeper, the three-time World Cup winner said, “The most important thing to grow is to build a good base. Get the players who are promising and start working on them. It’s important to send the players abroad for training. Sometimes, you have young and good players at home but without any international experience. It’s important to give exposure to the players,” he added.

Former India captain Sourav Ganguly asked him about the importance of infrastructure, to which Pele said, “No doubt about that. It’s easy to say that but if you don’t give the base in schools or at club level, how would players grow?” Cricket may not be known that well back in his country but Pele seemed quite familiar with Ganguly. Pele was asked if he (Pele) was the King of football, who was the Prince? Pele replied: “In sport, we have a Prince (Ganguly) next to us.” 

‘Messi best in last 10 years’ 

Pele termed Argentine forward Lionel Messi as the “best in the last 10 years”, but also spoke highly of his fellow Brazilian Neymar and Portugal's Ronaldo. “It's very difficult to make a comparison of players of different generations. But in the last 10 years, Messi was the best. Ronaldo plays forward and tries to score while Messi plays with a different style. In my team I would love to have both... We have Neymar who also has good future,” he said.

When asked to compare two Argentines greats — Maradona and Messi — Pele voted for Maradona. “Both are very good players. But the way I see football, Maradona was more complete than Messi,” said the Samba magician.

The 74-year-old agreed that the sport has become highly competitive, but Pele said he would have been successful had he played in this generation. “No doubt football today is tougher than before, but when God gifts you to play football it's the same in any generation. Football is all about skill. I'm sure Beto would have been equally successful had he played in this era.” — PTI