Pelé, Global Soccer Star Who Led Brazil to Three World Cup Wins, Dies at 82

Pelé, arguably the greatest soccer player of all time and a three-time World Cup winner with Brazil, died on Thursday in São Paulo of multiple organ failure due to colon cancer, according to the Albert Einstein Hospital, where he was being treated. He was 82.
During a 22-year professional career that set new standards for goal scoring and individual virtuosity, Pelé came to redefine the meaning of global sports celebrity and established Brazil as the supreme power of the world’s most popular game. He spent most of that time with his boyhood club in Brazil, Santos, before a high-profile move to the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League in 1975, a disco-era experiment that created a brief surge of passion for the sport in the U.S.