World Cup winner Paolo Cesar has laughed off comparisons between Pele and Wayne Rooney

Some newspapers likened England's latest soccer superstar to the Brazilian legend after the 18-year-old lit up Euro 2004.

But Paolo Cesar, a team-mate of Pele's in Brazil's 1970 World Cup-winning squad, said of Rooney: "When he has scored 1,200 goals, won five World Club Championships (with Santos) and three World Cups then we can start making comparisons."

Cesar, a guest of the Brazilian Soccer School's weekly training camp at Trinity and All Saints College in Horsforth, said that Pele and Garrincha were his heroes and that Bobby Moore and Bobby Charlton were the two English players who would have made it into the 1970 Brazilian side.

When asked if Pele was greater than Maradona, Cesar said: "At their peak they were the equal of each other, but Pele was greater over a 20-year period."

Cesar was brought up on a favello (Brazil's equivalent of a council estate) and his mother made him a football out of rolled-up newspaper.

He was lucky, however, that his father was a professional football coach, and he was always around professional players. Cesar said that Brazil learnt their lesson from being roughed up in the 1966 World Cup, not even qualifying from their group. He said: "We went on a three-month 'boot camp' before the 1970 World Cup to learn how to cope physically as well as technically.

"When we have done badly recently we have forgotten the technical side of things."