>

I saw him at a NASL game in the 1970s, playing for the New York Cosmos. He was much better than anyone else on the field. Second wasn’t even close. RIP.
RIP to the king of the game. Legend. >

He's arguably one of the primary reasons why soccer became the most popular sport in the world. RIP >

Retired ~50 years ago and remained a household name. >

Seriously though! As someone who doesn't follow sports all that much, it wasn't until a few years ago that I realized Pelé was an older man and not some present day sports superstar given how common it was to hear his name mentioned whenever soccer/football came up. >

I am just now learning that Pele is not a 35 year old man.  I don't know shit about fuck when it comes to soccer, but I knew the name Pele. >

Having learned about him growing up but not watching soccer I thought he played with guys like Beckham. He's to soccer what Wilt and Babe Ruth are to basketball and baseball. >

I'm not a soccer fan, but I get the impression that Pelé is far more important to soccer than Wilt Chamberlain is to basketball or Babe Ruth is to baseball. I'm not sure American sports has an equivalent to Pelé. >

Maybe not in importance but in complete domination of their sport setting records that still have yet to be broken. >

I was just speaking in terms of their importance. We have had many great players in different sports but Pelé is like the Jesus Christ of soccer, no American athlete matches that. Closest one would probably be Michael Jordan, but I don't think even he is on the same level because his fame has waned a bit in the 20 years he has been retired whereas Pelé has been retired for 50 years and is just as famous as he ever was. >

Jordan might be the closest example, I don't think his fame has waned much at all, with the last dance pushing him back up as far as sports conversations go. and culturally, look at the feet of any teenager in any UK city today, they're wearing the man's shoes. Although I can't speak for anywhere else, I'm sure it's a similar story >

This is going to be weird to some, maybe... but what i remember him most for is the movie Victory with him, Stallone, Michael Caine and Max von Sydow. Mostly a very fictionalized story about something from World War II... but it was a cool little movie where the Allies beat the Nazis at soccer.
They had Pelé using his skills to basically defeat the Third Reich. Sure, not all that super accurate, but it's a fun movie to watch. He was able to act at least as well as Stallone too. And it was one one of the last films directed by John Huston too. >

Now, Max von Sydow is a name I don't see mentioned nearly enough.  
LEVEL FIVE!! >

Max von Sydow was in tons of great movies. Awakenings, Game of Thrones, one of the new Star Wars movies, The Exorcist, Never Say Never Again, Flash Gordon, Dune, The Seventh Seal, Pelle the Conqueror, etc, He was one of the best actors to ever walk the planet.
He should be mentioned in the same catagory as Laurence Olivier, Lee Strasberg and Marlon Brando. >

You don't even mention his most important role. The voice of Esbern in Skyrim! >

Ha I didn't know that, but now I can totally hear it. >

Also the voice over in the trailer. >

This man was a global icon in a world before social media, the internet, etc. Even those who didn't follow sports knew his name. 
He even was the cause of a cease fire during the Nigerian civil war so they could watch him play. 
Legend doesn't begin to describe him. >

I know next to nothing about Soccer and even I know about him >

Pele is one of those people whose name transcended the sport. You don't have to follow the sport to know who Pele, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Wayne Gretzky, Venus and Serena Williams, are. >

At one time the most famous individual human was Muhammad Ali. Pelé was on that level, it is true.
Couple of other names as well: Jackie Robinson and Walter Payton.
Edit: fixed misspelled name. >

I don’t think Payton is on the same level as the others >

I was trying to think of the NFL player who was most deserving of being listed there. Payton's charity work was a big part of his life. He died over 20 years ago of a very deadly form of cancer. He worked to make the lives of a lot of people better. And he was one of the best Running Backs to ever play in the NFL. I don't know if he was the best RB ever, but he's in that "top-5" discussion.
What NFL player would you think makes more sense to list here? Or is the problem that, in your view anyway, that no NFL player ever ranked similarly in comparison for this specific list with others like Pelé, Ali, Gretsky, Jordan, etc. >

Walter was an amazing player and a better man, but yeah I don’t think any NFL player really belongs with the others. The league and sport just doesn’t have the same kind of out reach. >

American football really only matters to people from the USA. I sometimes get the impression that Americans don't understand that. >

It certainly got more popular over the past decade or so in Germany and I think Central Europe in general.
The Super Bowl used to be an one-off on the public service channels in 2010. It was mostly not advertised, started at midnight and only a few people watched it.
Now the numbers have tripled to 2 million viewers and every week a few selected matches are shown as well. It's popular enough that you probably hear some friend or someone at work talk about the Super Bowl.
Given that it's popularity rose that recently, Tom Brady is by far the most known player of all time here. >

Sure it got more popular, but that's still awful compared to other global sports. >

“The more difficult the victory, the greater the happiness in winning.” - Pele
RIP >

"That ain't my daughter!"  (even though DNA tests confirm it)
​
Pele. Blows off her funeral as well. >

Let people mourn.  Expecting every person who did great things to be perfect people is a problem of the chronically online. >

We’re just lucky people don’t post online about all our shitty things. >

Just imagine if all of our poops were on the internet? >

They are, we're just not popular enough for anyone to care. >

He retired nearly 50 years ago, but only a handful of players have been able to come close to him in the sport. One of the GOATS for sure. >

Fewer than a handful. Maybe two, but there's a lot of recency bias to account for in those comparisons. It wasn't until the early aughts -roughly 30 years after Pelé's last world cup- that it became 'acceptable' to openly question him as the GOAT, especially among younger people who never got to watch him play. People just got tired of hearing that the GOAT was someone not from their own era. But Pelé's utter dominance of the sport throughout his career remains unmatched. Very few athletes from any sport can compare in terms of how far ahead of the pack he was. Gretzky is one of those ultra-rare examples, but in Pelé's case, he dominated the world's single most played sport. >

Messi, Ronaldo (CR7), & Maradona are the players that can definitely stand alongside him. Others can be argued, but those three dominated the sport. >

Agree. Those are the 3 that immediately come to mind. (oh and  Brazil Ronaldo but he was a striker that was terrifying)
I was going for Ronaldo this WC (big Man U fan) but was so happy Messi got his in the end. I was wanting to see them square off for an intense match. Oh well. Bless Messi and RIP Pele. >

Changed the game forever. You will be missed >

I’m an old man, 74 next month and I was a Mormon missionary in São Paulo, Brasil from 1968 to 1970.  I had my training to learn Português and the instructors were guys who had been missionaries in Brasil. I learned the language pretty well, and at least once a week one of them would start talking about Pelé. I’m not much into sports of any kind but I found myself interested in hearing about him. 
When he played in São Paulo the streets would come to a halt and when he played in other parts of the world, ALL TV’s were turned to those games so it was tough to do missionary work. 
I’ve not been a Mormon for 24+ years and when I heard the news about Pelé, I remembered some of the good memories about that time of my life. >

That’s so cool, thanks for sharing >

I remember seeing him and the cosmos play at Shea stadium back when I was a kid. I didn't know it was a big deal being so young but going to the stadium was memorable for some reason.
RIP... I will always remember going to see the cosmos play and that is something >

People who have never even touched a soccer ball and know nothing about it still know how big he was in the game. A legend like no other. >

I had no idea who this was. I scrolled through the comments to figure out what he did.  
Lol really triggered some people all cause I said I had no idea who this pele guy was >

He was the best soccer player ever basically. I'm assuming your a bit like me, and an American. Think of him as a combination of Jackie Robinson's social importance with Michael Jordon's talent. It's a combination you don't normally see in this world. He couldn't just score goals. He could tell people how he did it what he was thinking at different fractions of the second as he drove down on a goalie. Some people have talent, but have no idea how to describe what they are doing in the moment. Pelé somehow knew what he was doing. >


His run with Santos stretched over three decades until he went into semi-retirement after the 1972 season. Wealthy European clubs tried to sign him, but the Brazilian government intervened to keep him from being sold, declaring him a national treasure.

I never did get into soccer/futbol, but I still can't imagine just how good a player at any sport has to be for their government to prevent them from being traded to a foreign team. I don't think the title "the ace" even starts to do it justice.
Also, the article links to a short story about how Edson Arantes do Nascimento came to be called Pele. >

Same thing happened recently when Emmanuel Macron personnaly asked a french player in Paris Saint-Germain not to leave the club for a foreign league >

The Greatest. The King. The Beautiful Player. 
Every superlative is absolutely warranted for the one and only Pele.
If you didn't watch soccer, you would have still thought of him as the greatest. If you did, you would have thought of him as invincible. 
He's immortal all the same. >

Yep. I'm not even remotely interested in sport as a whole but my family are, and I grew up hearing brilliant things whenever he was mentioned.
He wasn't just a fantastic player.
He was an icon. >

RIP. He was the first Pro Football player I ever heard of growing up in the USA. >

The One all players aspire to be. His memory for a blessing. >

Rest in peace legend. Only player to ever win 3 world cups. You'll be missed. >

3 with a *. He was out after the 2nd game in '62 and it was Garrincha that took the team on his shoulders and won it for Brazil. >

It does not work like that bro, he even scored in the opening game I think. No asterisk needed. 
But yeah, Garrincha absolutely deserves to be praised for his 62 performance >

It does for him, considering he constantly peddled the 3 wc victories as proof that he was the "greatest ever". Brazil was loaded during that era. >

Brazil was loaded and he was clear best out of everyone. The Greatest. The King of Football >

Oh ffs. He was clearly the greatest for one of them. One of them he was there for the beginning and the other he was a great player on a strong team. The third he was a non-factor. This is the problem with the Pele myth. People turned him into Paul Bunyan. If Garrincha weren't the person he was and had the marketing team behind him like Pele did then the same sort of thing could have happened with him because if you look at the film he was just as ahead of his time as Pele was. Pele was great. The greatest? There is no greatest. The sports way too big for one guy to be head and shoulders above the rest. That's the myth that pisses me off. >

yes, a myth; just don't ask his contemporaries who they think is the best player ever, or else your theory is gonna be even more absurd; he was the best for 4 world cups in a row, 2 he couldn't play them all because of injury and the ones he did he dominated >

"contemporaries" and :"ever" sure go well together in an argument. >

who else watched him play hundreds of games to judge his skill and abilities; I'm sure you didn't >

"hundreds"? really? The guy had 92 international caps and a good chunk of those were in SA. He played in the Brazilian leagues. They did not watch him play "hundreds" of time. Maybe they've seen him play 50 times. Their opinions are based on playing against him and yes, he was great. Greatest ever? I don't know, maybe. Head and shoulders above the rest, clearly the greatest lf all time and everybody who ever played the game should take a knee before him? Gimme a break. It's a bunch of Paul Bunyan myth crap that he actively tried to perpetuate. >

Rest in Peace, Legend 🔥 >

I was an exchange student to Brazil 1970-71.  First time entering country there was a ginormous traffic congestion due to pro soccer game.  He was such a super star!!!