Pele’s life off the field was as eventful as his record-breaking career on it, with three marriages and a range of trailblazing sponsorship deals which helped modern-day players fill their pockets with corporate cash.
Here AFP Sport looks at a side of the Brazilian superstar that often defied his squeaky-clean image:
‘Talk to your doctor’
Pele made millions by endorsing both Visa and Mastercard, and even sandals made with recycled tyre parts.
In her book “Sneaker Wars”, Barbara Smit details how, during the 1970 World Cup, Pele struck an agreement with Puma that would earn him $25,000 for the tournament, plus $100,000 for the following four years and a cut of branded boot sales.
The deal, which broke a pact between Puma and fierce rivals Adidas not to sign Pele because of the cost of a bidding war, was made on the condition that he tie his shoelaces before the kickoff of Brazil’s quarter-final match with Peru.
He duly did, the cameras caught the moment, and he earned himself a cool $2.85 million in today’s money, without calculating what he raked in from boot sales.
However his most infamous endorsement came in 2002 when he lent his name to impotence cure Viagra, encouraging viewers from inside Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana stadium “talk to your doctor, I would!”
The same year he was named Japan’s first educational ambassador for erectile dysfunction due to his advertising campaign for the drug. Pele however claimed that he never used Viagra.
Troubled family life
Pele was often presented as safe and corporate-friendly in comparison with the sometimes unpredictable Diego Maradona, with whom he did battle over the title of best ever footballer, but his personal life was fraught with problems.
His first son Edinho, who was born two months after his triumph at the 1970 World Cup, was in 2017 sentenced to over 12 years in jail for drug trafficking and money laundering.
In a interview that year with Bleacher Report, Edinho described how Pele — who had a reputation as a philanderer in his home country — became an absentee father once he moved the family to New York to play with the Cosmos in the North American Soccer League in the mid-1970s, leaving his first wife Rosemeri dos Reis Cholbi shortly after arriving in the US.
He later reconciled with Edinho, a former goalkeeper at Santos, the club where Pele made his name as a footballer, but his relationship with his first daughter was even more problematic.
He refused to acknowledge Sandra Arantes do Nascimento, who was born in 1964 of an affair with a maid, despite Brazilian courts ruling that she was his child in 1996 following a five-year legal battle.
Born Sandra Machado, she wrote a book entitled “The Daughter The King Didn’t Want”.
She died in 2006 of breast cancer aged just 42. Pele refused to go to the funeral, and he also never recognised her two children.
In his late 70s, Pele married for the third time in 2016, to 42-year-old businesswoman Marcia…
