The private Pele, the one even his most devoted fans never got to see, liked to sit in the back of the team bus.
When the New York Cosmos moved into the magnificent new Giants Stadium in New Jersey in 1977, it looked as if they, and soccer, had finally arrived. Before then, the Cosmos rarely attracted crowds larger than 15,000; in the 1977 season, they averaged more than twice that figure and three times surpassed 60,000.
The sudden change could be credited to one man: the incomparable Pele, who had come out of retirement three years earlier, at age 34, to join the Cosmos and try to turbocharge soccer’s popularity in the United States. Pele’s personal charisma was amplified by the masterful publicity machinery of Warner Communications, the team’s owner. Supplementing its A-list soccer team with stars from its music and film labels, Warner made Cosmos games a hot ticket, feted Cosmos players at Studio 54 and — by footing the bill for a polyglot media horde — generated a whirl of publicity in every league city the team visited.