Finland’s first top professional Aulis Rytkönen met Pelé on the field when the Brazilian prodigy was only 17 years old. The men met again decades later.
When football legend Pelé, who died of cancer on Thursday at the age of 82, was at his best in the 1950s and 1970s, the South American elite played mainly on their home continent and were only seen in Europe in prestigious tournaments and occasional friendly matches.
In 1986, Risto Puustinen from Pori, who represented HJK, received the best player award from his childhood idol after the HJK–Kuusysi match.
But one Finn had the great honor of playing against Brazil’s future national hero and the world’s only three-time world champion when he was only 17 years old.
He had left Kuopio for the world, passed away in 2014 Aulis Rytkönenwho was the first Finnish soccer player to have a tough professional career abroad.
Rytkönen, then 29, represented the French premier league club Toulouse, faced the Brazilian national team at the beginning of June 1958, when the yellow shirts were preparing for the World Cup in Sweden. The team won the championship with 17-year-old Pelé as its star, when Sweden fell in the final played at Råsunda in Solna.
Rytkönen recalled the unique encounter in his biography published in 2009 Monsieur Magic (letter Erkki Alaja, cust. Work).
“Right from the first minutes, I paid attention to the 17-year-old Pelé, who scored two goals in the match that ended 4-4. His balance and ability to control the ball hit a genius,” Rytkönen praised the Brazilian, who scored 1,283 goals in his 1,367 matches.
Pelé also won the world championship in 1962 and 1970.
The 17-year-old Pelé was a sensation at the World Cup in Sweden in 1958. In the semi-final against France, Pelé scored the last two hits of the brass in the 51 victory.
Surprisingly, the meeting between Rytkönen and Pelé in Toulouse in June 1958 was not the last. The Helsinki Football Club invited Pelé to visit Finland in 1986.
At that time, 45-year-old Pelé, who ended his active career in the USA in 1977, answered the invitation affirmatively, and the visit garnered a lot of media attention.
“Pelé was also introduced to the activities of the HJK women’s team in Finland, and Aulis was then the head coach of the representative team. The joy was great when it dawned on Pelé that one of his old adversaries was in it. So a bit like meeting old friends”, Erkki Alaja recalled on Thursday evening.
Lower emphasizes that Rytkönen, who was known as a modest man, did not brag about his experience.
“In that world, he didn’t announce that he played against Pelé, and there isn’t much about it in the book either. But without anything else, Aulis was also a unique Finnish player in that sense.”
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