Pelé: The Life Story Behind the Football King
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Edson Arantes do Nascimento was born on 23 October 1940 in Três Corações, a small town in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil, and the first thing to know about him is that nobody called him Pelé at first. His father, João Ramos do Nascimento, known as Dondinho, was a professional footballer, a centre-forward who played for clubs in Minas Gerais and never earned much money, and his mother, Celeste, kept the house and raised the children. The family was poor. Edson grew up in a house with little to spare, and like millions of Brazilian boys he learned football in the street, playing barefoot with a ball made from a sock stuffed with rags, a game Brazilians call pelada. He was small, quick and fearless, and he had a gift that coaches notice immediately: the ball seemed to stay close to his feet no matter how fast he ran, and he could shoot with either foot. The nickname Pelé came from his childhood, and its origin is still argued about. The most common story is that he mispronounced the name of a local goalkeeper, Bilé, as Pelé, and the other boys teased him with it until it stuck. He disliked the name for years. It sounded, to him, like nothing at all, and he would spend the rest of his life making it mean something.
He was discovered, as the story goes, by Waldemar de Brito, a former Brazil international who saw the boy playing and took him to Santos, the club on the coast of São Paulo state, in 1956. Pelé was fifteen. He made his debut for Santos in September 1956, in a friendly against Corinthians of Santo André, and he scored. Within a year he was the club’s top scorer, and in 1957, at sixteen, he was called up to the Brazil national team, making his debut against Argentina and scoring in a 2-1 defeat. The speed of his rise was extraordinary, and it was not an accident. Santos was a good club, but it was not a great one, and Pelé transformed it. He was not just a goalscorer, although the goals came in astonishing numbers. He was a complete forward: he could dribble past three defenders, he could head the ball, he could pass, he could shoot from distance, and he could do it all at full speed. Defenders who had spent their careers stopping ordinary forwards found that nothing they did worked, because Pelé did not play like an ordinary forward. He played like the game had been invented for him.
Sweden 1958: a seventeen-year-old conquers the world
The 1958 World Cup in Sweden made him a global star, and it did so in the space of three weeks. Pelé was seventeen, the youngest player in the tournament, and he did not play in Brazil’s first two matches, partly because of a knee injury. He came into the team for the quarter-final against Wales and scored the only goal, a piece of skill in which he flicked the ball over a defender’s head, turned, and volleyed it into the net. In the semi-final against France he scored a hat-trick, three goals in a 5-2 victory, and in the final against Sweden, in front of a crowd that included the Swedish king, he scored twice in a 5-2 win. The second of those goals, a header after he had chested the ball down and flicked it over a defender, is still shown in every compilation of the greatest World Cup goals. Brazil had never won the World Cup before. Pelé had won it at seventeen, and he had done it in a way that made the whole world pay attention. He cried when the final whistle went, and the photograph of him being carried off the pitch by his teammates became one of the most famous images in sport. He was a boy from Três Corações who had just become the best footballer on the planet, and he was still young enough to be overwhelmed by it.
The years that followed were a mixture of triumph and frustration. Brazil won the World Cup again in Chile in 1962, but Pelé was injured in the second match, against Czechoslovakia, and he watched the rest of the tournament from the sidelines while Garrincha, his great teammate, carried the team to the title. In England in 1966, he was kicked out of the tournament, literally: defenders from Bulgaria and Portugal fouled him so brutally that he left the field injured, and Brazil were eliminated in the group stage. He was twenty-five, and he said afterwards that he would never play in a World Cup again. He meant it at the time, and the fact that he changed his mind is one of the great strokes of luck in football history. Between the World Cups, he was doing something extraordinary at Santos. The club won the Brazilian championship six times in the 1960s, won the Copa Libertadores in 1962 and 1963, and won the Intercontinental Cup in both of those years, beating Benfica and AC Milan, the champions of Europe. Santos toured the world, playing exhibition matches in Africa, Asia and Europe, and Pelé became the most famous athlete on earth, a man whose name was known in countries where football was barely played. He was offered enormous sums to move to Europe, by Real Madrid, by Juventus, by Manchester United, and he turned them all down, partly because the Brazilian government declared him a national treasure, a legal designation that made it difficult for a foreign club to buy him, and partly because he was happy at Santos.
The thousandth goal and the war that stopped
On 19 November 1969, at the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro, Pelé scored the thousandth goal of his career, a penalty against Vasco da Gama, and the match was stopped so that he could be carried around the pitch by his teammates while the crowd sang. The number itself is disputed: Pelé’s own count includes goals in friendlies, exhibition matches and games for the army team, while the official count, recognised by football’s statisticians, is lower, at around 767 goals in 831 official matches. The argument about the exact number has gone on for decades, and it misses the point. Whatever the true figure, it was a total no one had reached before and no one has reached since in quite the same way, and the thousandth goal was celebrated across Brazil as a national event. The same period produced one of the most famous stories about his fame: in 1969, during a tour of Africa, Santos played a match in Nigeria, and the two sides in the country’s civil war are said to have agreed a ceasefire so that both could watch him play. The story has been questioned by historians, and the details are uncertain, but the fact that people believed it, and still repeat it, tells you something about the scale of his fame. He was not just a footballer. He was a figure whose presence could, for an afternoon, stop a war, or at least make people wish that it could.
The 1970 World Cup in Mexico was the tournament that sealed his legend. He had been persuaded to return to the national team, and the Brazil side of 1970, with Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostão and Carlos Alberto, is widely considered the greatest team ever to play the game. Pelé scored four goals in the tournament, including the opening goal in the final against Italy, a header that he rose to meet with extraordinary power, and he set up the fourth goal, a pass to Carlos Alberto that is still described as the greatest team goal ever scored in a World Cup final. Brazil won 4-1, and Pelé became the only player in history to win three World Cups. He was twenty-nine, and he was at the peak of his powers, and the team he played in was so good that it made the rest of the world look ordinary. He retired from the national team after the tournament, having played 92 times for Brazil and scored 77 goals, a record that stood for more than fifty years. He continued with Santos until 1974, and then, to the surprise of many, he came out of retirement to play for the New York Cosmos in the United States, a move that was part football and part missionary work: he wanted to help build the game in America, and the Cosmos paid him a fortune to do it. He played there from 1975 to 1977, and his final match, on 1 October 1977, was an exhibition between the Cosmos and Santos, in which he played a half for each team. When it ended, he was carried off the pitch again, and this time he did not come back.
After football: the ambassador, the minister, the king
Pelé’s life after football was long, complicated and, in the end, dignified. He became a global ambassador for the game, working with UNESCO and UNICEF, and travelling the world as the most recognisable face in sport. He was named FIFA’s Player of the Century in 2000, sharing the honour with Diego Maradona after a public vote, and the International Olympic Committee named him Athlete of the Century. In 1995 he entered politics, serving as Brazil’s Minister of Sports under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a role in which he pushed through a law, known as the Pelé Law, that reformed the relationship between clubs and players in Brazilian football, giving players more freedom to move. He left the post in 1998, frustrated by the politics of it, and he never returned to government. His personal life was less tidy. He was married three times, to Rosemeri dos Reis Cholbi, with whom he had three children, to the singer Assíria Lemos Seixas, with whom he had twins, and to the businesswoman Marcia Aoki, whom he married in 2016 and who was with him until his death. He had other children, including a daughter, Sandra Regina, whose paternity he long denied and only acknowledged after a court ordered a DNA test, a chapter of his life that he spoke about with regret in later years. His son Edinho, a goalkeeper, later faced legal troubles, and Pelé’s relationship with his children was, by his own admission, not always close. He was a better footballer than he was a father, and he knew it, and he said so.
He died on 29 December 2022, at the age of eighty-two, after a long illness with colon cancer, in a hospital in São Paulo. Brazil declared three days of national mourning, and his funeral, held at the Vila Belmiro stadium in Santos, drew tens of thousands of people. The tributes came from everywhere: from presidents, from players, from fans who had never seen him play but knew his name. He was buried in Santos, the city where he had become a star, and his legacy is now a matter of public record: three World Cups, more than a thousand goals by his own count, and a reputation, shared by almost everyone who saw him play, as the greatest footballer who ever lived. The arguments will continue, about Maradona, about Messi, about whether the game was easier in his day, and they are worth having. But the fact that the argument always starts with Pelé, that every great player since has been measured against him, is the real measure of his career. He did not just play the game better than anyone else. He changed what the game could be.
Santos and the team that toured the world
It is easy to forget, now that club football is dominated by a handful of European giants, how extraordinary Santos was in the 1960s. The club was not rich, it was not in Rio or in Europe, and it did not have the resources of a Real Madrid or a Milan. It had Pelé, and Pelé was enough. Under the coach Lula, Santos built a team around him that played attacking football of a kind the world had never seen: fast, skilful, joyful, and ruthless in front of goal. They won the Campeonato Paulista, the São Paulo state championship, again and again, they won the Brazilian national title six times, and they won the Copa Libertadores, the South American equivalent of the European Cup, in 1962 and 1963. In the Intercontinental Cup, the match between the champions of South America and Europe, they beat Benfica in 1962, a team that included the great Portuguese forward Eusébio, and AC Milan in 1963, and those victories announced to Europe that the best club football in the world was no longer played in Europe. Santos also toured constantly, playing exhibition matches in more than fifty countries, because the demand to see Pelé was so great that the club could earn more from touring than from its domestic season. Players who toured with him have described the experience as exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure: crowds of tens of thousands, airports full of fans, and a young man at the centre of it who never seemed to tire. The touring also meant that Pelé became the first truly global football star, known in Africa and Asia as well as in South America and Europe, a decade before television made that kind of fame normal.
What made him different from everyone else
Every great player has a gift, and Pelé’s gift was that he had all of them. He was fast, but he was not only fast. He could dribble, but he was not only a dribbler. He could shoot with either foot, he could head the ball with power and accuracy, he could pass, he could tackle, and he could read the game two moves ahead. Players who played against him have said the same thing in different words: you could not prepare for him, because he did not have a weakness to prepare for. If you marked him tightly, he would pass. If you gave him space, he would shoot. If you fouled him, he would get up and do it again. He also had something that is harder to describe and easier to recognise: he made the players around him better. Garrincha, Jairzinho, Tostão and Rivelino were all great players in their own right, but they played their best football alongside Pelé, because he created space for them, because he drew defenders toward him, and because his confidence was infectious. He was also, by all accounts, a remarkably clean player. He was fouled constantly, brutally, and he rarely retaliated. He believed that the best revenge was a goal, and he took that revenge more than a thousand times. The numbers, whatever the exact count, are part of the story, but they are not the story. The story is that he played the game the way it was meant to be played, with joy, with courage, and with a complete absence of fear, and that he did it for twenty years without ever losing that joy.
The King, and the country that claimed him
Pelé’s relationship with Brazil was complicated, and it changed over time. In the 1960s he was a national hero, a symbol of a country that was poor and ambitious and desperate to be taken seriously by the world. In the 1970s and 1980s, after he retired, he became something else: a businessman, an ambassador, a man who lived in New York and São Paulo and seemed distant from the country that had made him. Some Brazilians criticised him for not speaking out more forcefully about the country’s problems, for being too close to the powerful, for staying silent during the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. He was not a political figure in the way that some athletes are, and he did not pretend to be. He believed his job was football, and he did it. Later in life, as Minister of Sports, he tried to change Brazilian football from the inside, and he discovered how hard that was. The Pelé Law, which he pushed through in 1998, gave players the right to move freely when their contracts expired, a reform that was opposed by the clubs and that cost him political allies. He left government after three years, and he never went back. In his final years, he was universally loved in Brazil, and his death in 2022 was treated as a national event, with three days of mourning and a funeral that drew crowds from across the country. The arc of that relationship, from hero to critic to beloved elder, is the arc of a man who outlived the arguments about him. He was, in the end, simply O Rei, the King, and the title, which was given to him by the French press in the 1960s, is the one that stuck. He did not ask for it. He earned it, one goal at a time.
There is a final detail that captures the scale of his fame better than any statistic. In 1961, the Brazilian government declared him a national treasure, which meant, in practice, that he could not be sold to a foreign club. It was an extraordinary act, and it tells you how Brazil saw him: not as a footballer, not as an employee of Santos, but as a part of the country itself, like a monument or a work of art. No other player has ever been treated that way, before or since, and no other player is likely to be. The declaration was partly about money, and partly about pride, and it was also, in its own way, a cage. Pelé could not leave, even if he had wanted to, and he spent his best years in a league the rest of the world barely watched. That he became the most famous athlete on earth anyway, without ever playing in Europe, is the most remarkable fact of his career, and it is the one that will still be remarkable a hundred years from now.
He played his last match at thirty-six, and he lived for another forty-five years, long enough to see the game he loved become the biggest sport on earth, and long enough to watch a new generation argue about whether anyone had ever been better than him. The argument itself is his monument.
My Take:
The first thing I think about when I think about Pelé is the photograph. Not the goals, not the trophies, but the photograph of him being carried off the pitch in Sweden in 1958, a seventeen-year-old boy in a yellow shirt, crying, held up by his teammates, while the crowd cheers. It is the most famous image in the history of football, and it is famous for a reason. It shows a moment when a sport changed, when a boy from a poor town in Brazil became the best player in the world, and when the world first understood that football could produce something like joy. I think about that photograph whenever the argument about the greatest player of all time comes up, because it reminds me that greatness is not just about numbers. It is about a moment, and Pelé had more of those moments than anyone else who has ever played the game.
What strikes me most about his career is that he did it all without ever playing in Europe. Every other great player of the modern era, from Maradona to Messi to Cristiano Ronaldo, built their reputation in the European leagues, in front of the biggest audiences, against the best defenders. Pelé stayed in Brazil, at Santos, in a league the rest of the world barely watched, and he still became the most famous athlete on earth. That is an extraordinary fact, and it is one that people forget when they compare him to modern players. He did not have the Champions League. He did not have the Premier League. He had the World Cup, and he had Santos, and he had a talent so obvious that the world came to him. The Brazilian government declared him a national treasure to stop him leaving, and the world still found him. That tells me something about talent: it does not need the right stage. It makes its own stage.
The 1970 World Cup is the tournament I return to most often, because it is the one that settles the argument for me. That Brazil team, with Jairzinho, Rivelino, Tostão and Carlos Alberto, is the greatest team I have ever seen, on film or in person, and Pelé was its centre. He scored four goals, he set up the most famous goal in World Cup history, and he played with a joy that is visible in every piece of footage. Watch the final against Italy, and watch his face after the fourth goal. He is not celebrating. He is laughing. He is a man who is enjoying himself, in the biggest match of his life, in front of the whole world, and that enjoyment is contagious. I think that is the difference between Pelé and almost everyone else who has played the game. He never looked like he was working. He looked like he was playing, in the literal sense, like a child in the street with a sock full of rags, and the fact that he could do that at the highest level, in a World Cup final, is what made him the King.
The thousandth goal is the part of his story I have mixed feelings about, because the number itself has become a distraction. Pelé counted 1,281 goals in 1,363 games, including friendlies and exhibition matches. The official count is lower, around 767 in official matches. People argue about which number is right, and the argument misses the point. The point is not the number. The point is that he scored goals, in every kind of match, against every kind of opponent, for twenty years, and that he did it with a consistency no one has matched. The thousandth goal was celebrated as a national event in Brazil, with the match stopped and the crowd singing, and that celebration tells you something about what he meant to his country. He was not just a footballer. He was a source of pride for a poor country that did not have much to be proud of on the world stage, and the thousandth goal was a moment when the whole country could stop and say: look what we produced. That matters more than the exact count.
What I admire about his game is its completeness. There is no part of football he could not do. He could dribble, he could shoot with either foot, he could head the ball, he could pass, he could tackle, and he could do all of it at full speed. Modern players are specialists. Messi is a dribbler and a passer. Ronaldo is a finisher and an athlete. Pelé was everything, and he was everything at the same time. Defenders who played against him have said the same thing: you could not prepare for him, because there was no weakness to prepare for. If you marked him tightly, he passed. If you gave him space, he shot. If you fouled him, he got up and scored anyway. That completeness is why the argument about the greatest player always comes back to him. It is not that he was the best at one thing. It is that he was the best at everything, and that is a much rarer achievement.
The 1966 World Cup is the chapter I think about when I think about the cruelty of football. He was twenty-five, at the peak of his powers, and he was kicked out of the tournament by defenders who had decided that the only way to stop him was to hurt him. He left the field injured, Brazil were eliminated, and he said he would never play in a World Cup again. I understand why he said it. Football in the 1960s was a violent game, and the referees did not protect skilful players the way they do now. What impresses me is that he came back. He could have stayed retired from international football, and no one would have blamed him. Instead he returned, and he played the greatest tournament of his life in 1970, and he won it. That is not just talent. That is character, and it is the part of his story that young players should study most carefully. Talent gets you to the top. Character keeps you there after the game has tried to break you.
His life after football is the part I find most complicated, and most human. He was a global ambassador, a minister, a businessman, and he was also a man whose personal life was messy, whose relationship with his children was difficult, and whose silence during Brazil’s military dictatorship has been criticised. I think both things can be true. He was a great footballer and a flawed man, and the flaws do not diminish the football, and the football does not excuse the flaws. The story about his daughter Sandra Regina, whose paternity he denied for years and only acknowledged after a court order, is painful, and he spoke about it with regret in later life. I do not think it is my place to judge him for it, but I do think it is part of the story, and a life story that leaves it out is not honest. He was not a saint. He was a human being who happened to be the best footballer who ever lived, and human beings make mistakes, even great ones.
What his career says about Brazil is something I keep returning to, because it is the part of the story that goes beyond sport. Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s was a poor country, a country that the world did not take seriously, and Pelé gave it a reason to be proud. He was black, he was poor, he was from a small town, and he was the best in the world at the most popular game on earth. That mattered, not just to Brazilians but to black people everywhere, because it was proof that greatness could come from anywhere, and from anyone. He was not a political figure, and he did not try to be, but his existence was political, in the sense that it challenged the idea that the best things in the world come from the richest countries. He came from Três Corações, and he conquered the world, and that is a story that still matters, in Brazil and everywhere else.
The New York Cosmos years are the part of his career I find most interesting as a business decision, because they show a man thinking about his legacy. He came out of retirement at thirty-four, not for the money, although the money was enormous, but because he wanted to build football in America. It was a missionary act, and it worked, in the long run, even if it did not work immediately. The Cosmos drew crowds of tens of thousands, football became a little more popular in the United States, and the seeds that Pelé planted in the 1970s grew into the game that America has today. He was not just a player. He was an ambassador, and he understood that his fame was a tool he could use to grow the sport. That is a rare quality in an athlete, and it is one of the reasons his influence lasted long after he stopped playing.
If I have a criticism, it is that he stayed too long in the spotlight as a symbol, and not long enough as a voice. In his later years, he was wheeled out for ceremonies and photo opportunities, and he was rarely asked what he actually thought about the modern game, about money, about corruption, about the things that matter. He had opinions, and he expressed them occasionally, but he was more comfortable as an icon than as a critic. I understand why. Icons are loved. Critics are not. But I wish he had used his authority more forcefully, because there was no one in football whose voice carried more weight, and there were moments, particularly around the World Cups in Brazil, when that voice was needed. That is a small criticism, and it comes from admiration. He gave the game everything as a player. As an elder, he gave it less, and the game was poorer for it.
What I would say to a young player looking at Pelé’s career is this: learn the lesson of the sock full of rags. He did not learn football in an academy, with coaches and cones and video analysis. He learned it in the street, playing barefoot, with a ball that was barely a ball, against boys who were bigger and stronger than him. That is where his touch came from, and his balance, and his fearlessness. Modern academies produce technically perfect players, and they produce very few Pelés, because you cannot teach joy, and you cannot teach courage, and those are the two things that made him different. Play because you love it. Play because it is fun. Play in the street, with your friends, with a ball that is falling apart. That is where footballers are made, and it is where the greatest footballer of all time was made.
In the end, what I think about Pelé is simple. He was the best, and he was the best for the right reasons. Not because he scored the most goals, although he scored more than anyone. Not because he won the most World Cups, although he won more than anyone. But because he played the game the way it was meant to be played, with joy, with courage, and with a complete absence of fear, and because he did it for twenty years without ever losing that joy. The argument about the greatest player will go on forever, and it should, because it is a good argument. But it will always start with Pelé, and it will always come back to him, and that is the real measure of his career. He did not just play football better than anyone else. He showed the world what football could be.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where was Pelé born?
Pelé was born in 1940 in Três Corações, Brazil. The place shaped the early life and the work that followed, and Pelé has often been described as a proud representative of Brazil on the world stage.
What is Pelé best known for?
Pelé is best known as a footballer, and for the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, where a teenager scored in the final. The work that followed turned that breakthrough into a lasting international career, with World Cup 1970 (1970) among the most recognised projects.
What was Pelé’s breakthrough moment?
The breakthrough came through the 1958 World Cup in Sweden, where a teenager scored in the final. It was the moment when years of preparation met a wide audience, and it changed the scale of every opportunity that followed.
Has Pelé won any major awards?
Yes, the career includes three World Cup titles, the only player in history to achieve it, and FIFA’s Player of the Century honour. Beyond formal awards, the lasting recognition has come from audiences and from younger artists who cite Pelé as an influence.
What is Pelé’s most famous work?
Many fans would point to World Cup 1970 (1970), his third title, in the greatest team ever seen. Other landmark projects include World Cup 1958 (1958) and New York Cosmos (1975), and each one marked a different stage of the career.
What is Pelé’s legacy?
the King of Football, widely regarded as the greatest player who ever lived. The story continues, and the influence on new generations of artists from Brazil is already clear.
