Pele Signed Pennant of Brazil Flag

Sotheby's is proud to present this pennant of the Brazil Flag signed by Pele.

The signature has been authenticated by Beckett and James Spence Authentication.

To speak of Pele solely as a footballer is to misunderstand what he became. He was the sport's first truly global icon, a figure whose name carried meaning in countries where football was barely played, in languages that had no word for the kind of joy he produced on a pitch. Born Edson Arantes do Nascimento on 23 October 1940 in Tres Coracoes, Minas Gerais, to a family of limited means, he played football barefoot for years, before he joined Santos at the age of fifteen and made his international debut for Brazil at sixteen. By the time he returned from Stockholm in the summer of 1958, he was already something more than a footballer. He was a phenomenon.

Over the following two decades, Pele won three World Cups with Brazil, in 1958, 1962 and 1970, a record no other player has matched or come close to matching. He scored 1,281 goals across his career by official count. He was so singular that the Nigerian government and Biafran rebels agreed a 48-hour ceasefire in 1967 so that both sides could watch him play in an exhibition match. He appeared in films, recorded music, and was received by heads of state. He was appointed Brazil's Minister of Sport. He was the first athlete the modern world recognised as something beyond sport.

Yet perhaps his most consequential act was what he chose to do at the end of his career. In 1975, Pele came out of retirement to sign with the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League, in a country where the sport had never found meaningful footing against American football, baseball and basketball. His contract, worth $2.8 million over three years, made him the highest-paid athlete in the world at the time. The effect was immediate and transformative.

Crowds that had never watched a football match filled Yankee Stadium and then Giants Stadium to see him play.

Celebrities, politicians and cultural figures were drawn into his orbit. His arrival opened the door for Franz Beckenbauer, Giorgio Chinaglia, George Best, Gerd Muller, Johan Cruyff and Carlos Alberto to follow him to the NASL, and a generation of American children took up the game in his wake. The attendance record for a standalone national club match in the United States, set at Giants Stadium in 1977 when 77,891 fans watched Cosmos face Santos, still stands to this day.

“When people saw Pele for the first time, it’s was unbelievable, they’d burst out crying. Guys would grab him and kiss him like, ‘I’m standing in front of a God’. It was crazy.”

Brazilian soccer player, Edu

The NASL did not survive long after Pele's departure, but the grassroots game he had ignited could not be extinguished. Youth participation in football across the United States grew exponentially through the late 1970s and into the 1980s. When the United States hosted the 1994 World Cup to record global attendances, and when Major League Soccer launched in 1996, the direct line of inheritance ran back to Pele and the Cosmos. The 2026 World Cup returns to North America. As MLS Commissioner Don Garber reflected upon Pele's passing in December 2022: 'Without him, there likely is no 2026 World Cup to look forward to in America.'

He passed away on 29 December 2022 at the age of 82. The President of Brazil declared three days of national mourning. The flags at the Maracana flew at half-mast. The tributes came from every country on earth. What had begun on a June evening in Stockholm in 1958, wearing the shirt offered here, had over sixty-four years changed the sport and, in no small measure, changed the world.