Football trained Pele for 20 years of professionalism, which made him one of the richest people in Brazil, but when he was at the height of his football glory. And if he continued after retirement as was the time of the professional career, according to what was assumed by the American economic magazine Forbes last year, his annual salary would be 223 million dollars, in addition to tens of millions coming from what he does as an star, as well as from commissions he gets from sales of goods and the like bearing his name. .
Although the “king”, as the Brazilians call him, retired from the game a long time ago, he left assets of a fortune of more than $100 million, according to what Al Arabiya.net found on the Celebrity Net Worth website, which monitors from its headquarters in the United States the fortunes of stars and celebrities, which is what He will inherit his 7 children from two divorced wives, in addition to a childless widow, of Japanese origin, named Marcia Aoki whom he married when she was 50 6 years ago.
Heirs and resourcefulness
And not all that football bestowed on Pele came from what it usually gives to its big stars, according to what was mentioned in a book that appeared in 2008 entitled Sneaker Wars or “Sneaker Wars” written by British journalist Barbara Smit, a correspondent for years for famous media outlets, including the Financial Times, As the Economist magazine and others, in which Pele tricked the referee for 30 seconds in a match with Peru in the quarter-finals of the 1970 World Cup in Mexico.
Before the start of the match whistle, the “Black Jewel” approached the referee, and asked to stop for a moment so that he could tie his shoes, which we see in the video presented above, “at a time when all eyes and cameras were on the greatest football player of all time, as well as on his shoes.” According to the book, the host said that the shoe brand was Puma and appeared on the cameras of hundreds of television stations to more than a billion spectators in dozens of countries for half a minute.
With that trick, Pele got 120,000 dollars out of the company, or almost a million these days, with a contract under which he received 100,000 over 4 years, in addition to a commission from the sales of sneakers that the company decided to produce bearing Pele’s name.
Yesterday in Brazil, a broadcaster appeared on the local TV JC, and talked about Pele after his death, and said that “sport rejected him once, and told him no” when he applied in 1957 to play for a club called Rubro-Negro in the state of “Pernambuco” in the northeastern Brazilian, and he was He is almost 16 years old, but the club’s management dealt with his request with a kind of irony and rejected him due to his young age. Months later, Pele scored 6 goals in the 1958 World Cup in Stockholm, and Brazil won the cup over Sweden at home and in front of its fans.