After football

After his farewell in 1977 Pelé became football's best-known ambassador. He travelled for sponsors and for the game, and remained one of the most recognised people in the world.

He also worked in films. He had already acted on Brazilian television, and in 1981 he starred with Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine in Escape to Victory, John Huston's film about prisoners of war who play a match against a German team. He published several autobiographies, and he was the subject of documentaries including Pelé Eterno (2004) and the Netflix film Pelé (2021). The 2016 drama Pelé: Birth of a Legend told the story of his early life and the 1958 World Cup.

In 1992 the United Nations made him an ambassador for ecology and the environment, and he was later named a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. In January 1995 President Fernando Henrique Cardoso appointed him Brazil's first Minister of Sport. In office he proposed legislation to reduce corruption in Brazilian football, which became known as the Pelé Law. He left on 29 April 1998, when the ministry was abolished. In 1997 he received an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.

His business life was mixed. In 1993 he publicly accused the head of the Brazilian football federation, Ricardo Teixeira, of corruption, starting a long feud that led to his exclusion from the 1994 World Cup draw. In 2016 he sued Samsung in the United States over an advert that he said used a lookalike; the case was later settled.

The honours kept coming. The International Olympic Committee named him Athlete of the Century in 1999, and in 2000 he shared FIFA's Player of the Century award with Diego Maradona. In 2010 he became honorary president of a revived New York Cosmos, and in 2014 he received the first FIFA Ballon d'Or Prix d'Honneur. In 2018 he started the Pelé Foundation for children's education and poverty relief.

By then his health was declining. He had a hip operation in 2012, and from 2017 he often appeared in public in a wheelchair.