Pelé

About Pelé

Pelé, born Edson Arantes do Nascimento (1940-2022), is universally recognized as one of the greatest soccer players in history, a status reflected by his high ranking of #203 on MIT's Historical Popularity Index. He is the only player to have won three FIFA World Cups (1958, 1962, and 1970), scoring over 1,000 goals across his career and becoming a global cultural icon for the sport across multiple generations.

Despite his immense historical importance, Pelé's 2025 Wikipedia viewership of 1.9 million suggests an 'attention gap' of +4x, indicating overattention relative to his position (#203) when compared to figures with much higher historical weight, such as Blaise Pascal (#78) or Hippocrates (#102), who collectively garner less than 1 million views. While he commands significant modern attention, the data shows a -15.6% year-over-year change in views, suggesting a modest decline in immediate online interest in 2025 compared to the previous year.

This level of contemporary online traffic is more comparable to modern political figures like Xi Jinping (#719 importance, 4.0M views), highlighting how athletic celebrity often translates into higher immediate digital visibility than profound, long-term historical influence.