Pele’s farewell match: one half for each club (1977)

The Football Documentary Channel · Published 1 October 2026

Pele’s farewell match: one half for each club (1977)

Pele’s farewell match was played at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford on Saturday 1 October 1977, an exhibition in which he took one half for the New York Cosmos and one for Santos, the only two clubs of his professional career. Reinaldo put Santos ahead on 14 minutes, Pele equalised with a free kick on 42, the last goal of his professional career, and Ramon Mifflin won it for the Cosmos, 2-1, before 75,646 people.

Almost every part of it has since been retold wrongly: the crowd, the running order, the man in the presidential box.

The Last Ninety Minutes of Pele’s Career

The Real Ending Had Already Happened, in Portland

Thirty-four days earlier, on Sunday 28 August 1977, Pele had finished his competitive career in a place nobody would have chosen for him: the NASL championship final at Civic Stadium in Portland, Oregon, where 35,548 watched the Cosmos beat the Seattle Sounders 2-1, Giorgio Chinaglia heading the winner in the 78th minute.

So 1 October was ceremonial by design. Pele would take forty-five minutes for each side, and at the interval the teams changed ends while he stayed put in a different shirt. It was theatre with a real scoreboard.

How the Pele Farewell Match Was Actually Scored

Santos led first. On 14 minutes the Cosmos goalkeeper played the ball straight to a Santos shirt, and the move ran through Neto and Feijao to Reinaldo.

The equaliser arrived on 42 minutes, from around 30 yards. The Santos goalkeeper Ernani asked for only two men in the wall. Pele hit it hard and low into Ernani’s left corner and the goalkeeper did not touch it. He was 36, playing in a friendly, and he still put it where a goalkeeper expecting it could not reach. He had another half to play, in the other shirt, and did not score again.

Four minutes after the restart, with Pele now at the other end in a Santos shirt, Ramon Mifflin scored the winner. Mifflin was himself a former Santos player. He had come on precisely because Pele had gone, and he and Pele had arrived at the Cosmos in the same period and won an NASL title together. The man who replaced him then beat the club that made him.

Two Number 10 Shirts, Both Given Away

The interval was written in advance. During half time Pele presented his number 10 Cosmos shirt to his father Dondinho, himself a former forward. He gave his number 10 Santos shirt to Waldemar de Brito, who had found him at twelve; since he wore that shirt through the second half, it cannot have changed hands at the break. One shirt for the man who taught him, one for the man who found him. Then he walked to the other dressing room and Mifflin took his place.

Inside the stadium were 343 reporters, 168 photographers, 165 radio and television personalities and 90 film crew members. Pele sits with football’s mavericks for one reason on show that afternoon: the fuss never scaled to the fixture, and this one did not matter at all.

The Numbers the Sources Still Argue About

Two figures have never fully settled: the crowd and the career total. The crowd was 75,646.

The career total has never settled on a single number: 1,283 goals in 1,367 matches, or 1,281 in 1,366, a small gap that comes from different rules on which friendlies, tours and army football to count rather than from any error. Whatever the total, this free kick was the last of them. He started the match with the Cosmos and finished it with Santos, the only order consistent with Mifflin coming on for him in the New York side at the interval.

Rain, Ali, and the Man Who Was Not There

The claim that President Jimmy Carter watched Pele retire has been repeated for decades and is wrong. On Saturday 1 October 1977, his fifty-third birthday, Carter was at Camp David, where he telephoned his son Jeff at seven in the evening. The guest on the pitch that day was Jeff Carter, who presented Pele with a plaque before kickoff. Kissinger was there too, having helped talk Pele into the Cosmos in 1975, but by then he was out of office, having left the state department that January, eight months before the match.

Before kickoff Pele spoke about children and about love, as he had after his thousandth goal in 1969, and asked the stadium to repeat one word with him: “Say with me three times: Love! Love! Love!” In the same pre-match ceremony Muhammad Ali embraced him and told him the two of them were the greatest. Then it rained through the whole second half, hard enough that a Brazilian paper led the next morning with “Even The Sky Was Crying”. At the end the Cosmos goalkeepers Shep Messing and Erol Yasin hoisted him up, and players from both sides carried him round a drenched pitch, holding the flags of Brazil and the United States.

READ MORE: More last acts, debuts and farewells in our On This Day series →

The Pele Farewell Match (1977)

A free kick from around 30 yards, two number 10 shirts given away, a Peruvian substitute beating his old club, and 75,646 people standing in New Jersey rain to watch a friendly. For more players who bent the sport around themselves, read Football Mavericks.

Sources: Santos FC, New York Giants, HISTORY, ESPN, Band, CNN Brasil, Infobae, New York Cosmos, Portland Monthly, The Daily Star, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library.