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)

The Pele 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 on Santos FC’s own count. It is one of the odder fixtures in our On This Day series.

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 Portland Monthly puts 35,548 inside to watch the Cosmos beat the Seattle Sounders 2-1, Giorgio Chinaglia heading the winner, timed at 77 minutes by Portland Monthly and at 78 in most other accounts, including Steve Hunt’s own recollection of supplying the cross.

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, and the scoreboard is where the confusion started.

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. Santos FC’s own retrospective describes the sequence but names a goalkeeper the Cosmos squad list does not support, so he goes unnamed here.

The equaliser arrived on 42 minutes, from a distance Santos FC calls long and HISTORY puts at roughly 30 yards. The Santos goalkeeper Ernani asked for two men in the wall, which tells you what he thought of the range. 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. Band records the goal and the detail that makes it land: Mifflin was himself a former Santos player. Infobae reports that he came on precisely because Pele had gone, and that the two 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, and most retellings drop it. HISTORY records that during halftime Pele presented his number 10 Cosmos shirt to his father Dondinho, himself a former forward. The same account has him giving his number 10 Santos shirt to Waldemar de Brito, who had found him at twelve, without saying when; since he wore it through the second half, that one cannot have been 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.

HISTORY, alone among the accounts we could find, lists 343 reporters, 168 photographers, 165 radio and television personalities and 90 film crew members inside the stadium. 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 settled, and any account giving one number without a caveat is choosing rather than reporting. On the crowd, Santos FC and the New York Giants both publish 75,646, so the piece leads on that.

The career total is worse, and it is not a case of one source being sloppy: the two figures come from two governing bodies. Brazil’s football association and Santos count 1,283 goals in 1,367 matches; FIFA counts 1,281 in 1,366. Both sweep in friendlies, tours and army football, and they draw the line in different places, which is why the safest thing anyone can say about this goal is that it was the last one. Which club he started for is contested too: ESPN has him with Santos first, against four other accounts including Santos FC’s own, and that cannot be squared with Mifflin replacing him 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, and the proof is his own diary. The White House Daily Diary for Saturday 1 October 1977, his fifty-third birthday, has him at Camp David, telephoning his son Jeff at seven in the evening. The New York Giants’ photo archive identifies the guest on the pitch as Jeff Carter, presenting a plaque before kickoff, and Santos FC lists him in the same role. Kissinger was there, having helped talk Pele into the Cosmos in 1975, but he had left the state department that January, so describing him as the serving secretary of state is out by eight months.

Before kickoff Pele spoke about children and about love, as he had after his thousandth goal in 1969, and asked the stadium, in the New York Giants’ account of the day, 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, in Santos FC’s telling, that the two of them were the greatest. Then it rained through the whole second half, hard enough that a Brazilian paper led next morning with “Even The Sky Was Crying”, as ESPN recounts. 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.