This Sunday (29) marked two years since the death of the best player football has ever had: Edson Arantes do Nascimento, known as Pelé.
Almost 1,300 goals in his career, three World Cups won, Athlete of the 20th Century, one of the best-known personalities on the planet. Missing, today and always, the King of Football.
With the memory of Pelé and the end of the year approaching, I decided to check which important football characters died in 2024.
The most famous, at the beginning of January, Mario Jorge Lobo Zagallo and the German Franz Beckenbauer. In the same month, Gigi Riva, Italy’s striker at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.
In February, Andreas Brehme, scorer of the goal that gave Germany the world title in 1990, in Italy. Further ahead, in May, Argentine coach César Luis Menotti.
Also gone were players who reached the Brazilian team, idols in their clubs: Amaral (defender, Guarani), Dudu (midfielder, Palmeiras, uncle of Dorival Júnior, current coach of the Brazilian team) and Adílio (midfielder, Flamengo).
All these deaths this Sheet reported. One was missing, which I consider relevant.
In fact, not only this Sheetbut, from what I found, no major media outlet, national or foreign (exceptions made to the Uruguayan newspapers El País and El Observador), reported the death of Dagoberto Fontes, one day before Menotti’s.
The younger reader and/or those not so knowledgeable about football will ask: but who is this guy? How relevant is it to the sport?
Uruguayan Dagoberto Fontes was not a star player and, on cold analysis, he does not deserve much attention in football encyclopedias.
But he had a remarkable minute of fame, starring, together with Pelé, in a well-known move in the history of World Cups, in 1970, the World Cup in which the Brazilian team won the trifecta.
In the semi-final in Guadalajara, a nervous and very harsh game between Brazil and Uruguay, at one point the midfielder stepped on Pelé, who was falling in the process.
This, however, was not his minute of fame. After a while, the King responded, “marking” his opponent. The number 10 advanced to the left of the Jalisco stadium field. He noticed that the person accompanying him was Celeste’s number 15.
Near the Uruguayan penalty area, Dagoberto Fontes aligned himself with Pelé. Both at speed, Pelé, meticulously, raised his right arm, at head height, and made a sudden movement backwards, delivering a very strong elbow to the marker’s face.
The two collapsed on the lawn. It was an infraction for Pelé’s expulsion. However, the Spanish referee Jose Maria Ortiz de Mendibil, grotesquely, awarded a foul to Dagoberto Fontes on the King. He didn’t see the attack, or pretended he didn’t see it.
With Pelé unharmed, Brazil won 3-1, advanced to the final and beat Italy 4-1. Uruguay finished in fourth place, losing their last game 1-0 to West Germany.
Dagoberto Fontes, who said about the memorable elbow in 2020 that “my eye went to the back of my head”, died at the age of 80, in Maldonado, the city in which he was born, of an undisclosed cause.
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