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Who really said it

Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pelé. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man

Attributed to Pelé 1940–2022 · Brazilian forward · three-time World Cup winner
Attributed In copyright

Credited to Pelé wherever it appears, and squarely in character for a man who spent fifty years as football’s global ambassador — but the only source anyone ever gives is a Sports Illustrated web feature, “SI Flashback: Soccer’s greatest genius” (1 June 1999), which we could not retrieve and which entered circulation through a single anonymous Wikiquote edit in 2005. Note what the title itself concedes: a flashback is a retelling, so even the citation does not claim to say when Pelé first said this.

Last verified 25 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pelé. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man” attributed to Pelé (1940–2022). No primary source has been located. Wikiquote and the quote sites that follow it cite "SI Flashback: Soccer's greatest genius," Sports Illustrated, 1 June 1999; that citation has stood on Wikiquote since an anonymous edit of 2 November 2005, and the article itself could not be retrieved — Sports Illustrated's own vault archive now returns 404. Quote Investigator has never examined the line. Checked by Quotle.info, 25 Aug 2026.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Estate of Pelé (Edson Arantes do Nascimento); and, for the article text, Sports Illustrated). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Pelé — Brazilian forward · three World Cups (1958, 1962, 1970) · IOC Athlete of the Century, 1999. Theme: "Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pelé. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pelé. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The paper trail

Credited to
Pelé (Edson Arantes do Nascimento), 1940–2022
Cited source
"SI Flashback: Soccer's greatest genius," Sports Illustrated, 1 June 1999
Citation first seen
Wikiquote, 2 November 2005 — added by an anonymous IP editor, no link or page given
Primary source
Not located: the cited article could not be retrieved, and SI's vault archive returns 404

Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pelé. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man. Free-floating — no surrounding article text on record

The sentence always travels alone. Nothing anywhere — not Wikiquote, not the aggregators, not the obituary round-ups — supplies the question it answered, the reporter it was said to, or a line of text on either side of it.

Pelé on Wikiquote, the entry carrying the Sports Illustrated citation

How far the citations get

  • Wikiquote ↗ carries the line in its main Quotes section — in bold, and again as the caption on the page’s photograph — cited to “SI Flashback: Soccer’s greatest genius,” Sports Illustrated, 1 June 1999. It is not filed as disputed or misattributed; it is simply given a source, without a link, a page or an author.
  • That citation has been on the page, word for word, since an edit of 2 November 2005 ↗ by an anonymous IP editor, 65.203.76.4, who added quotation and source together in a single change. We walked the page’s revisions back to its creation in July 2005: that edit is where it starts.
  • Quote Investigator ↗ has never taken this one apart — the phrase search returns “Nothing Found” — so there is no specialist earliest-attestation to defer to, and no finding that contradicts the attribution either.
  • The magazine itself is the missing link. Sports Illustrated’s vault URLs now return 404, among them the archive stories linked from its own 2022 Pelé retrospective ↗ — which walks through SI’s Pelé coverage from 1958 to 2014, names no 1999 article by this title, and never quotes the line.
In copyright

Whether Pelé said this in 1999 or years earlier, it is a modern remark by a named twentieth-century speaker, far past the 1931 United States public-domain line, so there is no basis for treating it as public domain — the words rest with his estate. Any published transcription of them, including the Sports Illustrated feature the citation names, carries its publisher’s copyright on top.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Not misattributed — mis-sourced

No one else has ever been credited with this sentence; there is no rival claimant to knock down. What fails here is the sourcing. One citation was typed into Wikiquote in 2005, everything else copied it, and the document at the end of the chain cannot be produced.

“Sports Illustrated,” 1 June 1999 Unverified

It names an article, a magazine and a date, and nothing else — no author, no page, no link. It arrived complete in an anonymous Wikiquote edit of 2 November 2005 ↗, six years after the date it asserts, and we could not retrieve the article behind it. Sports Illustrated’s vault URLs — including those linked from its own 2022 Pelé retrospective ↗ — now answer 404.

The word “Flashback” Ambiguous

Even taken at face value, the citation does not date the remark. The title Wikiquote records ↗ is “SI Flashback: Soccer’s greatest genius” — on its face a look back, which would make 1 June 1999 the date of the retelling and leave the moment Pelé spoke unfixed, possibly decades earlier. Treat any page that reports this as a thing Pelé “said in 1999” as going beyond its own source.

AZQuotes, QuotePark, LibQuotes Circular

All three reproduce Wikiquote’s citation word for word, adding nothing. QuotePark ↗ is candid about it, labelling the entry “Adopted from Wikiquote”; AZQuotes ↗ and LibQuotes ↗ simply print the same line as if independently established.

Goal, IBTimes and the obituary round-ups Sourceless

Goal ↗ prints it under “A role model” with no source whatever, and IBTimes ↗ gets only as far as “Sports Illustrated, 1999.” Topend Sports ↗ gives nothing but the name. None of them went to the magazine either.

Nothing here suggests the words are not Pelé’s: no other speaker is ever named, and the sentiment matches a public role he really occupied. But a quotation is only as good as the document behind it, and until someone produces the Sports Illustrated page that Wikiquote names ↗, this is a line to credit, not a line to certify.

Context

Why nobody ever asks for a source

The sentence is believable because it describes a job Pelé really held. From his teens he was not just a player but the sport’s emissary — Wikipedia ↗ records that he spent 1975 to 1977 at the New York Cosmos selling football to a country that barely played it, and that the IOC named him Athlete of the Century in 1999. A man in that position saying he owes children more than a stepover is not a claim anyone stops to check.

And so nobody did. The whole documentary basis for this quotation is one edit made by an anonymous IP address on a Wednesday in November 2005, which added the sentence and its Sports Illustrated citation together, and which can still be read exactly as it was typed ↗. Twenty-one years of quote pages, listicles and obituary round-ups rest on it, and not one of them has gone back to the magazine.

One anonymous edit in 2005 is the entire paper trail.

What we checked, and what came back

Quote Investigator — a phrase search returns “Nothing Found,” and a site search for Pelé ↗ surfaces no article about the footballer at all. There is no specialist finding to defer to, in either direction.

Wikiquote — the line sits in the main Quotes section, bolded, and doubles as the caption on the page’s photograph. Its citation names an article and a date but no author, no page and no URL.

Wikiquote’s history — we walked the page’s revisions from its creation in July 2005. The quote first appears on 2 November 2005 ↗, added by the IP editor 65.203.76.4 with the Sports Illustrated line already attached, and the wording of both has not changed since.

Sports Illustrated — we could not read the cited feature. The magazine’s vault URLs now answer 404, including the archive stories linked from its own 2022 Pelé retrospective ↗ — a retrospective that lists SI’s Pelé coverage from 1958 to 2014, names no 1999 piece by this title, and does not carry the quotation.

Portuguese — the line does not travel in Brazil the way his other sayings do. A Brazilian collection of 70 Pelé quotations ↗ does not contain it; its nearest neighbour is a different remark about setting an example for young players. That fits a line first written down in English, by an English-language magazine.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Leadership Character Purpose

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: Peléen.wikiquote.org

Carries the line in its main Quotes section and as the page's photo caption, cited to "SI Flashback: Soccer's greatest genius," Sports Illustrated, 1 June 1999 — with no link, page or author.
Wikiquote revision of 2 November 2005en.wikiquote.org

The edit that put quote and citation on the internet: added by the anonymous IP 65.203.76.4, both in a single change, unaltered since.
Quote Investigator (search)quoteinvestigator.com

Returns "Nothing Found." QI has never investigated this line — or, so far as its search shows, any line attributed to Pelé.
SI Vault: Remembering Pelé through the years (2022)www.si.com

Sports Illustrated's own guided tour of its Pelé archive, 1958 to 2014. It names no 1999 piece called "Soccer's greatest genius," does not carry this quotation, and the vault links it offers now return 404.
AZQuotes: the quote pagewww.azquotes.com

Reproduces the line with Wikiquote's Sports Illustrated citation verbatim — a representative example of how the citation propagated.
Goal: 70 facts about Peléwww.goal.com

A major football outlet printing the quotation under the heading "A role model" with no source at all — the usual state of the line in the press.

The man the line is credited to

Who was Pelé?

Pelé

1940–2022 · Brazilian forward · three World Cups (1958, 1962, 1970) · IOC Athlete of the Century, 1999

Edson Arantes do Nascimento — Pelé — played for Santos from 1956 to 1974 and for the New York Cosmos from 1975 to 1977, and won the World Cup with Brazil in 1958, 1962 and 1970, still the only player to win three. Wikipedia records his 1,279 goals in 1,363 games, exhibitions included, as a Guinness World Record, and notes that the International Olympic Committee named him Athlete of the Century in 1999. He is also one of the most quote-farmed figures in sport: tidy, uplifting sentences circulate under his name with no source attached, and this is one of them.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Best available source

No primary source located. Wikiquote — and the quote sites that follow it — cite “SI Flashback: Soccer’s greatest genius,” Sports Illustrated, 1 June 1999; that citation has stood on Wikiquote since an anonymous edit of 2 November 2005, and the article itself could not be retrieved.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Every kid around the world who plays soccer wants to be Pelé. I have a great responsibility to show them not just how to be like a soccer player, but how to be like a man’?” Last verified 25 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/every-kid-around-the-world-who-plays-soccer-wants-to-be/

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