Pelé

Professional Soccer Player

• Born: October 23, 1940
• Birthplace: Trěs Corações, Minas Gerais, Brazil
• Died: December 29, 2022
• Place of Death: São Paulo, Brazil

Brazilian soccer player

Considered the greatest soccer player of all time, Pelé starred on the Brazilian national teams that won the World Cup in 1958, 1962, and 1970. Following his retirement, the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League lured him to the United States, where he did much to popularize soccer. After retiring from the field, Brazil’s greatest goodwill ambassador also became his nation’s sports minister.

Area of achievement Sports

Early Life

Pelé, christened Edson Arantes do Nascimento, was born in Trěs Corações, Minas Gerais. His father, João Ramos do Nascimento, was a popular minor-league soccer player in a nation where soccer, or football, as it is called outside the United States, was a consuming passion. Pelé considered his father the greatest player in the world and wanted to be like him, but his mother, Celeste Arantes, hoped for a better career for her son than that of itinerant soccer player. Although Pelé attended school until the fourth grade, it held little interest for him. At age ten, he quit school and, when not working as a two-dollar-a-month shoemaker’s apprentice, spent his days going to Catholic mass and playing soccer with the neighborhood boys. The games provided a carefree interval in a life of poverty and insecurity, made worse when his father suffered a serious knee injury.

Young Pelé had natural gifts unlike anything his chums brought to their makeshift field. In Bauru, São Paulo, he and his friends played in the streets, with sticks or rocks marking the goals and rags tied up with string serving as the ball. One day they pilfered a cargo of raw peanuts and then roasted and sold them in the streets to raise money for a real ball and some faded uniforms. A local promoter organized them into a team, and for two years they won the children’s championship of Bauru. By this time, Pelé had acquired his famous nickname. (“Pelé” is a meaningless word in Portuguese, although it is derived probably from the verb pelejar, to battle.) Pelé also caught the attention of Valdemar de Brito, a former member of the Brazilian national team and coach of the Bauru Athletic Club. Brito offered Pelé a contract to play for his club’s youth team, and the boy led the team to three championships.

Life’s Work

Pelé was almost fifteen years old and a slender 130 pounds when Brito took him to Santos, Brazil, for a tryout with the team, a major Brazilian club. Although awed by the big city, Pelé managed to focus and impress the coach. For several months, he played on the junior squad, but on September 7, 1956, he substituted in the second half for an injured player and scored his initial first-division goal. By early 1957, still only sixteen years old, he was a striker on the starting team, and the goals had begun to accumulate.

Brazilians loved graceful, elegant, attacking soccer, and Pelé gave it to them. As his body matured, he stood five feet nine inches and weighed 165 pounds. A superb athlete, he had a powerful kick with either foot, remarkable peripheral vision, great leaping ability, and amazing skill in feinting and dribbling. Pelé embodied creativity on the field, using acrobatic moves to manufacture seemingly impossible shots and passes. Most important, he used his individual skills to improve the play of his teammates.

Pelé won international recognition in 1958, when he was chosen at age seventeen to play on the Brazilian national team in the World Cup competition held in Sweden. Suffering from a knee injury, he did not participate in Brazil’s first two games of the tournament. In the quarterfinal match against Wales, however, he gave the Europeans a taste of the spectacular: Receiving a high pass on his chest, he used his foot to lift the ball over the onrushing defender’s head and then blasted it past the goalkeeper without the ball ever hitting the ground. The goal gave Brazil a 1-0 victory. He marked three goals in Brazil’s 5-2 win over France in the semifinal. Pelé’s two goals in the final against Sweden helped give Brazil a 5-2 victory and its first world championship.

Pelé’s success in Sweden and the elegance and showmanship of Brazilian soccer made his Santos club a tremendous draw on the international circuit during the following years. A group of Italian clubs offered Santos one million dollars in 1960 for Pelé, and the Brazilian congress responded by declaring him a “non-exportable national treasure.” With Pelé leading the way, Santos won the world club championship in 1962 and 1963.

In 1962, Brazil gained its second World Cup triumph, this time in Chile. Pelé scored once and assisted on Brazil’s other goal in its 2-0 victory over Mexico in its initial match, but in the second game against Czechoslovakia, he severely pulled a muscle. Fortunately for Brazil, the team had good depth, and Garrincha, Pelé’s sidekick in the forward line, emerged as the star of the tournament. Pelé’s injury kept him out of action for several weeks after Brazil’s 3-1 defeat of Czechoslovakia for its second consecutive championship.

The 1962 World Cup gave a taste, however, of the new levels of violence to which international soccer had sunk and to which Pelé would be subjected. The increasing intrusion of politics and nationalism into international competition and the financial rewards for success added to the tendency for teams to seek victory at any price. Stars such as Pelé became marked, subject to brutal, vicious tackling, which in his eyes seemed even worse because his style of play emphasized elegance and agility.

The Brazilian national team headed to England in 1966 in search of its third consecutive world championship, but the fates were unkind. At the peak of his game, Pelé went into the competition on a wave of international acclaim and national euphoria. Brazil’s midfielders were past their prime, however, and the tournament was being played in northern Europe, on the English fields where soccer had originated. Sir Stanley Rous, English president of the International Soccer Federation, which conducted the tournament, had allegedly instructed referees to let the northern Europeans play their style of soccer rather than penalizing them for defensive aggressiveness. Brazil defeated Bulgaria 2-0 in its first match, but a brutal tackle left Pelé injured for the remainder of the tournament. Without Pelé, the Brazilians then lost to Hungary. Trying to save the team from elimination, Pelé attempted to play against Portugal. Savagely fouled, Pelé was reinjured. In the wake of Brazil’s defeat, Pelé’s spirit was shattered, and he vowed not to play in another World Cup competition as a protest against the mounting violence.

Back home in Brazil, his love for the game gradually revived, and besides, he had contractual obligations with Santos that carried him around the world and earned for both him and the club huge sums of money for exhibition matches. On November 19, 1969, he scored goal one thousand of his career against Vasco da Gama in Rio de Janeiro. The country nearly stopped in adulation, he received equal billing in the newspapers with an American moon landing, and Brazil rushed out a postage stamp commemorating his achievement.

The following year brought his crowning feat. Having put the misery of 1966 behind him, Pelé agreed to play once again for Brazil in World Cup competition in Mexico. While he had never been strictly an individualist on the field, Pelé recognized that opponents would attempt to brutalize him again, and so he became the consummate team player in 1970. He flicked pinpoint passes to streaking teammates when defenses collapsed on him, fought valiantly on defense, and still marked marvelous goals. The final against Italy pitted the defensive, counterattacking strategy of European soccer with the slashing, offensive flair of the Brazilians. Pelé and his teammates won 4-1, retiring the Jules Rimet cup that belonged to the first country to win three championships.

The triumph in Mexico left Pelé with little to achieve on the field. He announced his retirement from the national team on June 18, 1971, to the consternation of Brazilians who hoped he would help defend the title again in 1974. Then on October 2, 1974, he retired from Santos, intending to devote greater attention to his family. After a secret six-year engagement to Rosemeri Cholby, a bank employee, the couple had married in 1966; they had three children, Kelly Cristina, born in 1967; Edson, born in 1970; and Jennifer, in 1978. Pelé’s business activities outside soccer were also time-consuming. He had invested in several industries and companies, starred as a detective in a television series, acted in movies, and performed songs that he had written. Manufacturers of clothing, watches, chocolate, soccer equipment, soft drinks, and bicycles all sought his endorsement. Despite poor initial financial management and near bankruptcy in the mid-1960s, Pelé became probably the wealthiest athlete in the world and certainly the most famous in the 1970s.

As it turned out, Pelé’s soccer career was not finished. In 1975, he shocked the soccer world by signing a $7 million-dollar, three-year contract to play for the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League (NASL). He needed the money to offset business losses but was also motivated by love for his country and for soccer. He saw the Cosmos’ offer as an opportunity to be a goodwill ambassador for Brazil in the United States and at the same time popularize soccer there, where it had always been a minor sport. While some Brazilians were initially upset that their hero was leaving to play in the United States, they came to take great pride in his achievements there.

During the three seasons he played, Pelé was by far the greatest draw of the NASL. The Cosmos set attendance records wherever they played, and Pelé retained enough of his skills to awe American crowds. When he retired in 1977, his final opponent was the Santos club from Brazil. At halftime, he put on his famous Santos shirt and finished his career playing for his old team. When the match ended, both teams carried him off the field on their shoulders to the chant of “Pelé! Pelé!” from the 76,000 fans who had braved a rainstorm to witness history.

Retirement offered neither rest nor peace. Family and financial issues sometimes brought troubles. Shortly after the birth of their third child in 1978, Rosemeri sought a divorce, unhappy that Pelé’s many travels left him little time for family life. They divorced in the Dominican Republic in 1982. Pelé remarried in 1994. His second wife, Assíria, had twins in 1996. Besides the five children he had with Rosemeri and Assíria, Pelé acknowledged his paternity of two others, Sandra Arantes do Nascimento (b. 1964), who became a public official in Santos before her death from cancer in 2006; and Flávia Christina Kurtz (b. 1968). Meanwhile, Pelé’s fame and charisma continued to offer him many business opportunities with companies interested in securing his help in marketing their goods and services. However, this sometimes led to disputes and stressful entanglements. Perhaps his most serious crisis, however, related to his first son, Edinho, who played for a while as goalkeeper for Pelé’s old Santos team. Edinho became addicted to narcotics and was arrested and jailed in 2005 for drug trafficking and money laundering.

Such problems did little, however, to dim Pelé’s popularity or his social and cultural importance. The British crown gave him an honorary knighthood in 1997. National and international groups named him to represent them. He served as the United Nations ambassador for environmental issues in 1992 and later was named a UNESCO goodwill ambassador. Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso selected Pelé to serve as minister of sports, a position he held from 1995 to 1999. When it came time for the Olympic torch to pass through Brazil for the 2004 Summer Games, it was only natural for Brazil to make Pelé the first choice to carry the torch. In 2005 he worked closely with German Catholics to gather Christmas donations for Brazil’s poor.

In international soccer circles he remained the king, despite receiving some criticism at home for not having coached or offered sound analyses of the game since his playing career ended. In 2000 the International Federation of Football (FIFA), soccer’s international governing body, named Pelé the best player of the twentieth century. Two years later, FIFA chose an all-star team of players who had participated in all the World Cups, and Pelé was a unanimous choice for the team. When the jersey he wore during the 1970 World Cup was auctioned by Christie’s in London in 2002, it sold for nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The company that marketed Pelé’s name, jerseys, and other memorabilia produced handsome royalties for him. In 2006 the British luxury publisher, Gloria, came out with a limited edition, 35-pound, 720-page lavishly illustrated (more than 1,700 photographs) biography of Pelé, titled Planet Pelé, which sold for $3,000 a copy; that same year, Simon and Schuster also released Pelé: An Autobiography. In 2012, a museum dedicated to the former star player was inaugurated in Santos. The 2015 autobiography Why Soccer Matters talks not only of Pelé's own career and accomplishments but also of the state of the game and the future he envisions for it.

Pelé died on December 29, 2022, at the age of eighty-two due to complications from colon cancer. At the time of his death, many still considered Pelé to be one of the greatest soccer players of all time.

Significance

Gracious and accommodating to his fans, Pelé was idolized throughout the world. Brazilians regularly talked about electing him president, and he was the most recognized figure in the country. Many Africans thought he was a demigod. The Nigerians and Biafrans briefly halted the Nigerian Civil War so that Pelé could play an exhibition there. Popes and heads of state asked to meet him, curious about the person who attracted such universal acclaim. A few Brazilians quietly criticized him for not being more of a social reformer, for not taking bolder stands on behalf of his country’s poor people and Black people, but such celebrity activism would have been out of character. Instead, he was an outstanding role model for children, set a good moral example, and devoted much time to his fans. He also returned to his studies and received a university degree.

During his twenty-two-year career, Pelé played 1,363 games and scored 1,283 goals. From 1957 to 1966, for ten consecutive years, he was the leading scorer in the tough São Paulo League, and he also stood at the top in 1974, when he retired in Brazil. The youngest to play on a World Cup winner, he was also the only person to win the World Cup three times. In addition, Pelé scored what was reputed to be the greatest goal in the history of the game: Taking the ball in his own penalty area, he dribbled the length of the field, eluding nine defenders, and scored. Brazilian television replayed a tape of that goal every day for the next year. Altogether, Pelé played soccer in eighty-eight different countries.

Pelé’s ability to create goals for teammates and make seemingly impossible shots set him apart as a genius who epitomized the “beautiful game” played by the Brazilians in stark contrast to the trend of modern soccer to become more and more conservative and defensive, avoiding risk and subduing individualism. That genius and his long career helped exalt Pelé above all others who have played the game. Pelé's status as a Black Brazilian who rose from poverty through accomplishment also likely contributed to his mythology, as he effectively broke the color barrier in international soccer. He also served as an inspiration for a younger generation of soccer stars such as Portuguese player Cristiano Ronaldo.

Bibliography

Bodo, Peter, and David Hershey. Pelé’s New World. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.

Drehs, Wayne. "Pele and the Art of Being Pele." ESPN the Magazine. ESPN, 1 June 2014. Web. 6 Apr. 2016.

Harris, Harry. Pelé: His Life and Times. New York: Welcome Rain, 2001.

Lever, Janet. Soccer Madness. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Liew, Jonathan. "How and Why Pele's Mystique and Reputation as the World's Greatest Ever Footballer Has Been Overhyped." Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 4 June 2014. Web. 6 Apr. 2016.

Littlefield, Bill. Champions: Stories of Ten Remarkable Athletes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1993.

Mifflin, Lawrie. “Pelé, the Global Face of Soccer, Dies at 82.” The New York Times, 29 Dec. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/sports/soccer/pele-dead.html. Accessed 6 Mar. 2022.

Morris, Desmond. The Soccer Tribe. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981.

Pelé, with Orlando Duarte and Alex Bello. Pelé: The Autobiography. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006.

Pelé, with Robert L. Fish. My Life and the Beautiful Game: The Autobiography of Pelé. New York: Doubleday, 1977.

Rosenthal, Gary. Everybody’s Soccer Book. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1981.

Rote, Kyle, and Basil G. Kane. Kyle Rote Jr.’s Complete Book of Soccer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978.

Thébaud, François. Pelé. Translated by Leo Weinstein. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.