Pelé: The Story Of Football's GOAT

The Luke Alfred Show

This month is the anniversary of Pelé’s birth in 1940 in a small town in the state of São Paulo. Given that it would have been his birthday a couple of days ago, in this week’s podcast we have a good long look at Pelé and a good long look at Pelé’s Brazil, a land of spirits, coffee and military dictatorships. He was a man not only with the wrong name (more of this in a moment) but a nickname he couldn’t remember getting. This is his story. _________________________________________________________________________

PELÉ’S FULL NAME is a bit of handful, so let’s get it out of the way first, shall we? Edson Arantes do Nascimento, was the older of two sons born to Joao Ramos do Nascimento and Celeste Arantes on the 23rd of October, 1940. Edson was poor but his family weren’t so poor that they didn’t allow themselves to be graced by the wistfulness of aspiration. His parents wanted him to be named after Thomas Edison, the inventor of the phonograph, an early prototype of the lightbulb and the motion picture camera, so the fact that he was named Edson seems to have been a bureaucratic mistake.

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