#OnceUponATime Pelé and Cruijff

If Platini, Maradona, Di Stefano, Meazza, Puskas and a few others are rightfully in the elite of football… but these two have changed football forever.

The world of football is divided into a Before Pele and After Pele. And the same goes for Cruijff.

Pele has become the yardstick for all great champions, so much so that people have always gone in search of the "white Pele". He is the one who has brought football to every home, around the world. The one who made football a mass phenomenon. Pelé was to football what Muhammad Ali was to boxing, what Michael Jordan was to basketball, what Tiger Woods was to golf, a worldwide phenomenon capable of transcending the boundaries of his sport, and of enter the common imagination as the emblem of its sport itself! This is thanks to his unique abilities. A dry and fast dribbling, powerful and impregnable shots, impressive deadlifts, vision of the game as a director, recoveries from the midfielder, goals from an experienced striker, assist to the kiss for his teammates, shots as a sprinter, imagination to spare, incredible magic. And then the goals, those goals ... from heel, overhead, right, left, with fantastic acrobatics, with free kicks from all distances, with heads eating the defenders, and the goals scored after having skipped the defenders like skittles, or after having surpassed them with brilliant bell towers. Pele was Football !!!

Cruijff was the first total footballer. You saw him moving on the pitch and doing everything with extraordinary simplicity. With him the schemes jumped, or rather the schemes were marked by intelligent movement, the thought passage, the science applied to the game in a terribly pragmatic way ... yet fantastically beautiful! Total Football has time and space as its essential points. Total Kick is movement without the ball, knowing where your partner is, and where he will be. Total Football is intelligence, vision of the game, and adaptability… and no one has been able to represent this better than Cruijff. Johan was the great Copernican revolution of football, the one who changed this sport forever!

(In the photo, the two phenomena embrace before the Santos-Barcelona match)