Along with Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona, Pelé is one of the three players most often proclaimed to be the greatest male footballer of all time. But compared to Messi — possibly the most exhaustively scrutinised person on the planet, a man who has generated more data points than there are grains of sand in a desert — and Maradona — a figure belonging to football’s recognisable modern age, whose greatest goals retain a cinematic prominence — Pelé feels like a nebulous figure from a distant past.
It’s more than half a century since the last of his four World Cup tournaments. Most of us know Pelé only in outline: that he was a brilliant player, who scored lots of goals and won three World
