Pelé’s iconic blue No 10 shirt from the 1958 World Cup final is expected to become one of the most expensive football artefacts ever sold after being put up for auction.
The Brazilian was 17 when he scored two goals in the 5-2 win over Sweden to secure the Seleção’s first World Cup and write his name into football lore. Now Sotheby’s expects the shirt’s rich history will lead to it fetching more than $6m (£4.5m) when it goes under the hammer in New York next month.
That figure would put it, as a single item, behind only the Argentina jersey worn by Diego Maradona when he scored the Hand of God goal against England at Mexico 1986, which sold for $9.3m in 2022. A collection of six Lionel Messi shirts from the Qatar World Cup went for $7.8m in 2023.
“The shirt itself is in extraordinary condition for something that’s nearly 70 years old,” Brendan Hawkes, Sotheby’s vice president of sport strategy, said. “It’s just a really vibrant blue colour with the Brazil yellow on the back.
“One of the things that struck me when I actually first handled it was how small it was. Pelé wasn’t a very large man and he wore this shirt when he was 17. He was a lean young kid at that point, and if you look at the pictures from that match, the shirt is actually quite small on him.”
Pelé finished the tournament with six goals in four matches, and remains the youngest player to appear in a World Cup final. After the game he gave the shirt to his roommate Didi, and it stayed in Didi’s family until 1993, when it was donated to the Museu dos Esportes Edvaldo Alves Santa Rosa in Brazil. The museum offered the shirt at auction in London in 2004, where it sold for £59,000. Such is the boom in sports memorabilia that it is expected to fetch nearly 100 times that amount by the time bidding closes on 16 July.
“We have seen just a ton of growth in this market over the last five years,” said Hawkes. “Maradona’s Hand of God shirt is still the high watermark for a single football shirt but we’re placing this in the same orbit.”
Pelé revealed in his autobiography that a few of his teammates worried that wearing blue against Sweden would be a “bad omen”. “But Dr Paulo, the head of the delegation, turned it round cleverly,” Pelé wrote. “He said blue would be lucky, as it was the colour of our patron saint, Nossa Senhora de Aparecida, and it had served previous teams well.” And so it proved.