Jonathan Clegg

Pele is like the first star of the World Cup.

His legend grew with the tournament.

So as the tournament became the biggest thing in sports, Pelé was the star of the tournament and he became the sort of greatest soccer player, the best known soccer player and was considered the best soccer player of his era.

Yeah, or like Muhammad Ali.

He's very much of that ilk, the Ali, Jordan.

Yeah.

I guess the one thing he shares with Pelé is a taste for the limelight.

When he joined, FIFA was a nonprofit that put on the World Cup and sold the TV rights, but was not maximizing what it could make from those.

So it didn't have a ton of money.

By the time he leaves FIFA in the 2010s, FIFA is sitting on billions of dollars in cash reserves.

More than $1.5 billion, to be exact.

literally to build soccer pitches and build stands for the spectators to stand in and build youth academies and build training facilities in parts of the world where they don't have access to funds to do that sort of thing.

So he's giving money to the developing nations that make up FIFA's 211-member base.

I mean, I think... Humanitarian?

I mean, you know...

calculating he's an opera he's a very canny operator is is probably how i describe him um i mean i think you know it really can't be sort of overstated how sort of revolutionary it was to conceive of a fifa president whose power would lie in you know

the African and Asian and Caribbean voting blocks rather than the traditional places where soccer had been played and invented.

And he's not sort of explicitly buying their vote with development funds.

But what he is doing is sort of ensuring a lot of goodwill in those countries for future candidacies when he runs as president, especially because FIFA was not very forensic in terms of following how that money is spent.

Yeah, by then they were using airplanes.