Published by: HispanicAd
By: Daisy Expósito-Ulla
July 21, 2026
He was not in Rio. To everyone’s surprise he was not in Rio de Janeiro as had been agreed.
El Rey, with whom our U.S. “delegation” was going to meet, had suddenly flown to São Paulo: an hour and 15 minutes flight from the Aeroporto Internacional de Rio to the Alberto Santos-Dumont Aeroporto.
What does it take to meet a king?
What this meant, in practical terms, was that in order to fulfill our mission, we would need to quickly change our travel plans: It meant “Let’s go to São Paulo!” to meet The King of this story. Simply put, if the king goes to São Paulo, the commoners go to São Paulo — especially if the king is the great Brazilian footballer Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as El Rey Pelé.
A “delegation” in search of a dream
The monarch of this tale had helped make fútbol an international attraction and — how naive of us at the time! — we were there because some dreamers in sports and communications in the United States, thought that the spell of this magical sport, with the help of Pelé, could be replicated here.
I was just a member of this small but quite enthusiastic American group: A young New York-based Cuban-American advertising executive with zero knowledge of the “jogo bonito,” chosen by the top echelon of the early Univision Network, formerly Spanish International Network, (SIN), on account of the investing potential that some of our clients at Y&R’s The Bravo Group, like AT&T, could mean in terms of support. This, of course, if the dream of bringing “The Game” to the United States ever came true.
Was this a “wild dream”?
More than thirty years later, that wild dream has come to fruition. The mission of visionary entrepreneurs like Lamar Hunt, Steve Ross, Alan Rothenberg, and Philip Anschutz helped introduce soccer in America, laid its foundations and contributed to building its infrastructure. With soccer dethroning baseball among children in the United States, and becoming the third most-practiced sport in schools, its cultural impact beyond Latinos, presents a compelling case study. Who could have dreamed, for example, that fútbol would become a passion among American school-age girls, and that the U.S. Women’s National Team would write international history and give birth to a robust domestic soccer ecosystem? And now, a World Cup!
The Latinos who paved the way
But I would argue that none of this would have happened without some movers and shakers from our culture, and communications industry, who were the “early believers,” the patient fútbol bettors, back in the day, when the dream was nothing but a dream, with a way too distant chance of becoming reality. I can think, of course, of SIN, and René Anselmo, an indefatigable “kid” from Massachusetts who traded his Italian background for a job with Televisa in Mexico that would make him an honorary Latino for the rest of a life that seemed out of a movie. Anselmo, like a young Chilean television producer named Joaquín Blaya, were there at the start of what could only resemble a risky illusion. Then came Unvision which would light an unquenchable candle in a valley of hope at the time. And, through this “Trust the future” kind of epic crusade, came some equally unextinguishable faithful like, obviously, TELEVISA’s Emilio Azcárraga Milmo, (“El Tigre”), who had controversially brought a World Cup to Mexico, as a result of more than a miracle of persistence. Among the “creyentes,” this unstoppable, zealous legion of passionate fútbol worshippers, included specific players like, again, Joaquín Blaya, Raúl Toraño and others, who I may be unforgivably leaving out. Their spiritual, nearly religious conviction for this global sport, is at the root of the phenomenon that — finally! — ensued in spite of the pessimism of so many naysayers.
The road was bumpy and it wasn’t easy…
Because this game wasn’t won easily! There were plenty of yellow and red cards to survive. In those “early days,” as the U.S. Hispanic Market slowly began to turn some serious attention to Pelé’s sport, geographical and cultural differences started to rear their ugly heads: not all Latinos are created equal which meant not all Latinos were in love with “the sphere,” as some commentators refer to the soccer ball.
If fútbol was by tradition the “touch point” of all emotional touch points for South Americans, we were faced at the time with a pronounced affection gap when it came to Hispanics from the Caribbean region. A good number of them preferred baseball while others were already attracted to U.S. football or even basketball.
Joaquín Blaya — first of SIN and then Univision — remembers with humor the learning curve and how it all started: “Azcárraga had the rights to show the Copa Mundial in closed circuit TV, and full of optimism, we rented the Miami Beach Convention Center, with its impressive 9,500-seat capacity. We were excited, ambitious, and hopeful but that first year we broke records of poor attendance! — averaging around a mere150 for most days and barely 400 persons for the biggest game!”
Can a cultural phenomenon be stopped?
Along the exhilarating journey we quickly began to discover fútbol’s impact on almost all angles of culture: In Paris it would cross paths with The Three Tenors gathered at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower. In Italy it would see Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras playfully singing to the magic of the round ball at the Roman Baths of Caracalla.
How many sports, or, rather, which other sports have this degree of societal contagion? In my “fútbol initiation” trip to meet Pelé, there was a serendipitous coincidence: a concert in Rio to rejoice in the birthday celebration of the Brazilian musical giant Antônio Carlos Jobim. Arriving at the venue where the master of bossa nova would give a mesmerizing performance, we saw the inevitable: a parking lot filled with kids beautifully — effortlessly! — playing soccer to the tune of “The Girl From Ipanema” blasting through the speakers.
In front of The King
When our Univision group, headed by Giora Breil, who had been with PEPSI/Brazil, met —at last! — with Pelé in São Paulo, The King turned out to be a most humble and approachable monarch. Pelé spoke with the grace of an ambassador of the Brazilian easygoing spirit and the aplomb of a seasoned businessman, a mixture of samba, pure intuition and impeccable logical reasoning. Convincingly, I remember he shared with us a contagious trust in the unexplainable universality of fútbol.
With a twinkle in his eyes, he jokingly referred to the proverbial “800-pound gorilla in the room”: American Football. He by no means sounded awkwardly pushy or even competitive. Much less envious. He just didn’t want to ignore — or pretend to ignore — the issue which he courageously tackled by name. With a relaxed smile that denoted both Pelé’s wisdom, humility, and generosity, I recall he said, more or less, the following: “American football is amazing and exciting — but American football is local.”
Where fútbol is in today’s America
American football has nothing to fear, though. We know it too well. Yes, the MLS is doing really well and all that, but American Football remains the sport that 125 million American viewers watch across NBC, Peacock and TELEMUNDO which bring it to us in the form of NFL games and as the show of shows: the Super Bowl. But fútbol is here with a force!
We know the nuances. While the World Cup is a phenomenal success with 1.5 billion viewers worldwide, a number that American Football can’t dream to reach (its viewership is limited to the domestic numbers and few other countries), there is no doubt that this World Cup may not beat American Football, but it starts a promising trend in America. A huge win for NBC-TELEMUNDO and its visionary leaders, like César Conde, who can celebrate the triumph of gathering 25 to 48 million plus passionate viewers, depending on the game, to partake in a transcultural ritual of collective frenzy. A cultural shift of major proportions in this country, to the point that approximately 50% of English-speaking viewers are choosing to watch the games in Spanish, perhaps to get the “full” experience and hear the distinct, iconic voice of Andrés Cantor calling the emotion of each play.
Who knows, maybe El Rey Pelé, the charismatic man who “single footedly” made fútbol a global thing, saw something in that ball that others didn’t. Still, I ask myself, could he have gone as far as dreaming of a World Cup being decided on U.S. soil between two teams from two Spanish-speaking countries? Seems like too much, right? But such is the magic of fútbol — such is the passion of our people!