Pelé Quiz

Pelé is the man against whom every debate about football's greatest still begins — the teenager who won a World Cup and never really stopped. This free Pelé quiz runs the whole arc: the 15-year-old Waldemar de Brito delivered to Santos in 1956, the phenomenon who tore up Brazilian football through the 1960s and made Santos world champions, the three-time World Cup winner, and the ageing king who crossed the Atlantic in 1975 to launch the game in America with the New York Cosmos. Only two professional clubs in a career that spanned two decades and, by FIFA's count, well over a thousand goals. If you can name the club he scored his 1,000th goal against, this quiz is for you.

The defining moments arrived early and never stopped. At the 1958 World Cup in Sweden he became the youngest man ever to win the tournament, at 17, and scored a brace in the final against the hosts — still the youngest player to score in a World Cup final. He won again in 1962, then produced perhaps his masterpiece in Mexico 1970, opening the scoring in the final against Italy and setting up two more as Brazil kept the Jules Rimet Trophy for good. He remains, as of 2026, the only man to win three World Cups. In between came the landmarks: 643 goals for Santos — the most for a single club until Lionel Messi passed it in December 2020 — the two Copa Libertadores and Intercontinental Cups of 1962 and 1963, and the 1,000th goal, a penalty at a packed Maracanã against Vasco da Gama in November 1969.

Expect the full spread. Some of it you'll know cold — the country he won all three World Cups for, say — but the quiz climbs fast. It digs into the Santos golden era and the managers around him, his 77 goals in 92 games for Brazil, the reported $7 million the Cosmos paid to bring him out of retirement in 1975, and the finer print: the opponent in his 1956 Santos debut, the honours he collected in the NASL, and just how Brazil kept a global superstar from ever leaving for Europe.

Every question comes with a short explained answer, so you finish the set knowing more than when you started. Play the sample set below free in your browser, no sign-up. And if it grips you, the full Ball IQ app has 4,000+ questions plus daily challenges and multiplayer.