Who Was Pelé?

1. Três Corações and Bauru: a poor boy who played barefoot

Pelé was born Edson Arantes do Nascimento on 23 October 1940 in Três Corações, a small town in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. His father, João Ramos do Nascimento, known as Dondinho, had been a professional footballer, and his mother, Celeste Arantes, kept the household together on very little money. The family moved to Bauru, in the state of São Paulo, when Pelé was a boy, and it was there that he grew up in poverty, playing football barefoot in the streets with a ball made of rags or a grapefruit, as generations of Brazilian children have done.

The nickname Pelé has no clear origin, and Pelé himself said he did not know where it came from, although it may have begun as a childhood mispronunciation of the name of a goalkeeper his father admired. He was named after the American inventor Thomas Edison, a fact that says something about his parents' hopes for him. As a boy he worked as a shoeshine boy and in a tea shop to help his family, and he played for a youth team called Bauru Athletic Club, where his talent was so obvious that a former Brazilian international, Waldemar de Brito, took him to Santos for a trial when he was fifteen.

Santos signed him in 1956, and he made his first-team debut that year, scoring on his debut against Corinthians. He was sixteen years old. Within a year he was the top scorer in the São Paulo state championship, and within two years he was in the Brazil national team. The speed of his rise is hard to exaggerate: a boy who had been shining shoes in Bauru was, before his eighteenth birthday, the most talked-about young footballer in the world.

2. Sweden 1958: the seventeen-year-old who conquered the world

Pelé made his debut for Brazil in 1957, at the age of sixteen, and was selected for the 1958 World Cup in Sweden despite an injury that kept him out of the first two matches. He played his first World Cup game against the Soviet Union, in a match that Brazil won, and in the quarter-final against Wales he scored the only goal, a piece of skill in which he controlled the ball on his chest, flicked it over a defender and volleyed it home, a goal that announced him to the world.

In the semi-final against France he scored a hat-trick, and in the final against Sweden he scored twice, including a famous goal in which he lifted the ball over a defender and volleyed it into the net, as Brazil won 5-2. He was seventeen years and 249 days old when he won the World Cup, the youngest player ever to win the tournament, a record that still stands. The Swedish press called him a prodigy, and the Brazilian team that returned home was greeted as heroes. Pelé, who had been a boy from Bauru two years earlier, was now the most famous teenager on earth.

The 1958 tournament also set the pattern for his career. He was not only a goalscorer but a player of extraordinary grace and imagination, capable of goals that seemed invented on the spot, and he played with a joy that made him loved even by the supporters of the teams he beat. The French, the Swedes and the Welsh all remembered him with admiration, and the tournament made football itself more popular around the world, because for the first time the game's greatest player was also its most charming ambassador.

3. 1962, 1966 and the long road to 1970

Pelé won his second World Cup in Chile in 1962, although his part in it was cut short by injury in the second match, and Brazil won the tournament without him, led by Garrincha. The 1966 World Cup in England was a bitter experience: Pelé was kicked repeatedly by defenders, most famously by the Bulgarian and Portuguese teams, and Brazil were eliminated in the group stage. He was so disillusioned that he said he would never play in a World Cup again, a promise he later broke, and the tournament led to changes in the rules to protect skilful players, a reform that owes something to what happened to him in England.

He returned for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, and the Brazil team of that year is widely regarded as the greatest international side ever assembled. Pelé, Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostão and Gérson played football of a beauty that has never been matched, and Pelé himself, at twenty-nine, was at the height of his powers. In the final against Italy he scored the opening goal with a header, made the pass for the fourth goal, a famous strike by Carlos Alberto, and Brazil won 4-1. It was his third World Cup, and no other player has won three. Brazil were allowed to keep the Jules Rimet Trophy permanently, and Pelé was carried from the field on the shoulders of the crowd.

The three tournaments tell the story of his international career in miniature: the prodigy of 1958, the injured bystander of 1962, the victim of 1966, and the master of 1970. Across his Brazil career he scored 77 goals in 92 appearances by the official count of FIFA, a record that stood for more than half a century. The Brazilian federation counts 95 goals in 114 matches, including games against club sides and state selections that FIFA does not recognise as full internationals, a difference that has been argued over ever since and that says something about how hard it is to count the goals of a player from an era when the line between a friendly and a competitive match was less clear.

4. Santos, the thousandth goal and the New York Cosmos

Pelé spent almost his entire club career with Santos, the coastal club he joined as a boy, and he stayed there for eighteen years, from 1956 to 1974, turning down offers from the great clubs of Europe. With Santos he won the São Paulo state championship many times, the Brazilian championship, and the Copa Libertadores, the South American club championship, in 1962 and 1963, followed by the Intercontinental Cup in both years, beating Benfica and then AC Milan. Santos toured the world, playing exhibition matches in Africa, Asia and Europe, and Pelé's presence drew crowds wherever the team went. In Nigeria in 1969, during the civil war, a ceasefire was reportedly agreed so that both sides could watch Santos play, a story that has become part of his legend.

On 19 November 1969, at the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Pelé scored his thousandth goal, a penalty against Vasco da Gama, and the match was stopped while he was presented with honours and the crowd sang. The goal was a national event in Brazil, and it fixed the number one thousand in the public mind as the measure of his career. By the time he retired from Santos he was credited with 1,279 goals in 1,363 matches, a total recognised by Guinness World Records that includes exhibition and friendly games alongside competitive matches, and it remains one of the most famous statistics in sport, even though the exact count is disputed by those who count only competitive games.

In 1975, a year after leaving Santos, Pelé came out of retirement to join the New York Cosmos, in the North American Soccer League, a move that was intended to make football popular in the United States. He played for the Cosmos until 1977, winning the league championship in his final season, and his farewell match, against Santos at the Giants Stadium in New Jersey, was watched by a huge crowd and broadcast around the world. He retired for the second and final time at the age of thirty-six, having done for American football what he had done for the game everywhere else: made people who had never watched it want to see it.

5. The record and Neymar: 77 goals and the passing of the torch

For more than fifty years Pelé's 77 goals for Brazil stood as the national record, and it was regarded as one of the safest records in football. In September 2023, Neymar scored twice in a World Cup qualifying match against Bolivia in Belém, taking his total to 79 goals in 125 appearances and passing Pelé's mark. Neymar said afterwards that he had never imagined reaching the record, and that he did not consider himself a better player than Pelé, and the Pelé Foundation congratulated him on the achievement. The moment was handled with grace on both sides, and it was a reminder that records are made to be broken, even the records of the greatest.

Neymar went on to finish his international career in July 2026 with 80 goals in 130 appearances for Brazil, after Brazil's elimination from the 2026 World Cup, and he retired from the national team as the country's leading goalscorer. The comparison between the two players has been argued ever since Neymar passed the record. Pelé's supporters point out that his average of 77 goals in 92 matches is far higher than Neymar's, and that his goals were scored in three World Cup-winning campaigns, while Neymar never won the World Cup. Neymar's supporters point out that he played in a different era, against better organised defences, and that the record itself is the record.

The debate misses the point in one respect, which is that Pelé himself would have been the first to welcome it. He spent his life arguing that football belonged to everyone and that the game would go on producing great players after him. The passing of the record did not diminish him; it confirmed that the standard he set was still the standard by which Brazilian footballers are judged, more than half a century after he set it.

6. Minister, ambassador and the man after football

After retiring, Pelé became a public figure of a different kind. He acted in films, recorded music, wrote books and appeared in advertisements, and in 1995 he was appointed Brazil's Minister of Sports, a post he held until 1998. As minister he championed a law, known as the Pelé Law, that reformed the relationship between clubs and players in Brazil, giving players more freedom to move between clubs, a reform that was controversial with the clubs and welcomed by the players. He also campaigned for the 2014 World Cup to be held in Brazil and for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, and he was a prominent figure at both events.

He was named Athlete of the Century by the International Olympic Committee in 1999, and in 2000 he was voted, jointly with Diego Maradona, the FIFA Player of the Century, an honour that reflected the long argument between their supporters about who was the greater player. Pelé and Maradona had a complicated relationship, respectful in public and competitive in private, and the argument between their admirers is still one of the great debates of football. Pelé's own view was generous: he called Maradona a great player and said the game was big enough for both of them.

In his later years he became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations and for UNESCO, campaigning on education, health and the environment, and he remained a revered figure in Brazil, where his birthday was a national occasion and his opinions were sought on everything from football to politics. He was less visible in his final years as his health declined, and he was treated for colon cancer in his last year. He died on 29 December 2022 in São Paulo, at the age of eighty-two. Brazil declared three days of national mourning, and his coffin lay in state at the Santos stadium, where tens of thousands of people came to pay their respects.

7. Why Pelé still matters

Pelé matters because he was the first footballer to belong to the whole world. Before him, the great players were known in their own countries and among the followers of the game; after him, a footballer could be a global celebrity, recognised in places where football was barely played. He made the number ten shirt the most famous in the game, he made the bicycle kick and the chip and the dummy into things children practised in playgrounds on every continent, and he made Brazil itself synonymous with beautiful football, an association that has lasted for more than sixty years.

He also matters because of what he represented. He was a Black man from a poor family who became the most famous person on earth at a time when that was almost unimaginable, and he carried that fame with a grace and a generosity that made him loved in a way that few sportsmen have been. He never lost his connection to Santos or to Bauru, and he never stopped saying that football was a game that belonged to everyone, rich and poor alike. The tributes that followed his death, from presidents and from children who had never seen him play, showed that his fame had outlived his career by decades.

The final measure of Pelé is that the argument about the greatest player of all time still begins with him. Other players have scored more goals, won more trophies or played in more famous teams, but no one else won three World Cups, no one else did it as a teenager, and no one else changed what football meant to the world. The game has moved on, as it must, but the standard he set, of skill, of joy and of grace under pressure, is still the standard by which the greatest players are judged.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Pelé
• Wikipedia — Pelé
• FIFA — Pelé tribute

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• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Mark Twain? — Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and became America's most famous humorist.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.