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Each of us has some kind of ritual buried deep in the dungeons of our subconscious mind, and football players are no different in this regard. Pele, the global football icon, believed in a superstition that almost ended his career.
During the mid-sixties, Pele's performance, whose real name is Edson Arantes do Nascimento, declined badly with the Brazilian club Santos, to the point that it confused everyone, including the club's officials, and caused Pele himself to panic, as he thought that his talent had declined and there was no way to return it.
After much analysis, Pele came to the conclusion that he had given his "lucky" shirt to a fan in a previous match, which caused his performance to decline, and he decided that this was the only logical reason to explain what was happening to him. So he hired a private investigator to track down the fan and retrieve the shirt he had given. The investigator succeeded in recovering the shirt, and Pele has been back to his best ever since.
But the story wasn't that simple, because what actually happened was that the investigator did not find the fan and did not recover the desired shirt, and what the investigator gave him was his shirt from a previous match.
The belief that the shirt was the same "lucky shirt" was enough to restore the Brazilian legend's confidence and return to his level.
As they say, everything is in the mind!
It is worth noting that Pele, who died on December 29, 2022 at the age of 82, won the World Cup with the Brazilian national team 3 times (1958, 1962 and 1970), and he has a famous saying: "I was born to play football, just as Beethoven was born to write music and Michelangelo was born to paint."
Source: RT https://ar.rt.com/yizx
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