The shirt Pele wore when he scored twice to help Brazil lift its first World Cup in 1958 has sold at auction for $4.9m, Sotheby’s announced on Thursday, making it the most expensive piece of Pele memorabilia ever sold.
The New York sale drew 10 bids from more than five bidders before the shirt found its buyer. Its value lies not just in who wore it, but in the moment it represents: a 17-year-old Pele scoring twice as Brazil beat host nation Sweden 5-2 in the final, a performance that made him the youngest player ever to score in a World Cup final, a record he still holds.
That victory marked the first of Brazil’s five World Cup titles and helped launch Pele, born Edson Arantes do Nascimento, into becoming one of football’s most enduring global icons.
Sotheby’s described the images from that 1958 final as among the most reproduced in the sport’s history, noting simply that the shirt now sold “was there.”
The same shirt previously changed hands in 2004 for a far more modest £70,505 (about $105,600), underscoring how dramatically the value of elite sporting memorabilia has climbed in the two decades since, and especially since Pele died in 2022.
Even at $4.9m, though, the shirt falls well short of the record for sports memorabilia. That distinction belongs to a baseball jersey worn by Babe Ruth during the 1932 World Series, which sold for $24.1m in 2024.
Other items have also outpaced Pele’s shirt, including Michael Jordan’s 1998 NBA Finals jersey, which fetched $10.1m, and the jersey Diego Maradona wore during Argentina’s 1986 World Cup quarter-final win over England, which sold for $9.2m through auctioneers Bonhams.
Together, the sales reflect a booming market for sports history, one where iconic moments, not just star power, increasingly command the highest prices.
