Brazilian football legend Pele: ‘I’d rather play for Arsenal than Chelsea’

Brazilian legend Pele-widely regarded as one of the best to play the game-has inadvertently weighed in on the rivalry between Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho, saying he would prefer to play for Wenger’s Arsenal.

“Arsenal is a good team to play with”, he said.

Now the greatest ever league football player says he likes teams which play attacking, open football. “Today it is hard to decide which teams play that way”, Pele said.

“Barcelona are the closest in style to Santos and are nearly the same style as Brazil in 1970″.

The Brazilian born Costa who has chosen to represent Spain at worldwide level had seemed to get away with a string of debatable incidents during Chelsea’s 2-0 win over Arsenal at the weekend, but has since been retrospectively banned for three games.

He added that he would have been happy to play for Barcelona or Arsenal.

Pele also waded into the fierce rivalry between Arsenal and Chelsea, asserting that he would have preferred to turn out for the former club if he was playing in the modern era.

We wonder what Arsenal’s Laurent Koscielny and Gabriel Paulista will think of Pele’s appraisal – they might well argue that refereeing is now rightly a little more robust than it was in the 60s and 70s.

Pele has weighed in on the latest controversy involving Chelsea forward Diego Costa and, perhaps surprisingly, opted to defend the disgraced hitman. “He didn’t get a red card but was charged”. It was dirty. So many things like this happen on the pitch and this is not good.

“There’s always been bad players and good players”.

‘It is not good for football’.