# Pelé vs Maradona — the Answer Changes With the Question
> Pelé and Maradona meet in 13 rankings — World Cup goals, the number 10, dribbling, their own clubs. Every list asks a different question.
*By YPB Team · Published July 30, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/pele-vs-maradona-ranked*
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Pelé in 1970 and Maradona in 1986 — the same stadium, sixteen years apart. Photos: Associated Press and El Gráfico, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Pelé won three World Cups and Maradona won one. Pelé scored 643 goals for a single club; Maradona turned a club that had never won the Italian league into champions twice. Football tried to pick between them once, formally: FIFA's Player of the Century, announced in Rome in December 2000, produced two winners because the internet voted for one man and a committee voted for the other.
Below they meet in 13 rankings — World Cup goals, the number 10, dribbling, height, their own clubs — and the case swings from one to the other depending on which list you are looking at.
> Ask who won more and you get one name. Ask who carried more and you get the other. Ask about a European Cup and you get neither.
## The two goals everyone can describe from memory
This ranking puts 17 World Cup goals side by side, and both Pelé and Maradona are in it — not as players, but as single moments.
Maradona's entry is the second goal against England on 22 June 1986 at the Estadio Azteca: a run from the halfway line past five England players. FIFA's centenary vote made it the greatest goal in World Cup history with 41% of the ballot, more than double the runner-up.
Pelé's entry is from the 1958 final against Sweden, scored at 17 — a chest control, a lift over the defender, a volley. It was one of two he scored that afternoon.
The rest is heavy company: Carlos Alberto's finish in 1970, Dennis Bergkamp against Argentina in 1998, Archie Gemmill's slalom in 1978. Four minutes separated the Hand of God from the Goal of the Century, and only one of the two is on this list.
A 60-yard run against a 17-year-old's volley, on the same list. Play it →
## Three tournaments against one
Twenty-eight players are ranked here on what they did at World Cups, which is the comparison Pelé and Maradona get pulled into most often.
Pelé won three — 1958, 1962 and 1970 — and is still the only man to do it. He played four tournaments and scored 12 goals, six of them in 1958 alone, when he was a teenager.
Maradona won one, in 1986, and took Argentina back to the final in 1990. His case is concentration rather than volume: 1986 is the tournament most often described as the best any single footballer has played.
Both then stand next to Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff and Ferenc Puskás. Beckenbauer won it once, in 1974. The other two never won it at all.
Three tournaments won against one, on the stage both are measured by. Play it →
## The continental trophy neither of them won
Copa América is the one major honour that appears in both careers as an absence.
Pelé played a single edition, in 1959 in Argentina. He finished as the tournament's top scorer with eight goals and Brazil finished second.
Maradona played three. Argentina went out in the first round in 1979, came fourth in 1987 and third in 1989. The country won the tournament in 1991 and 1993, by which point he was no longer part of it.
That leaves the list to other people. Zizinho's 17 goals remain the tournament record, shared with Norberto Méndez. Lionel Messi won it in 2021 and again in 2024 — the thing both of the men in this article were supposed to be certain to do.
The one continental trophy neither of them ever lifted. Play it →
## The widest question football has
This ranking has 32 options and no boundaries — no era, no country, no position. Pelé and Maradona are both in it, and so is nearly everyone else with a claim.
The argument between the two was once put to a formal vote, and the vote broke. FIFA's Player of the Century ran an internet poll that Maradona won by 53.6% to 18.53%. FIFA then convened a "Football Family" committee of journalists, coaches and officials, plus a magazine readers' vote, which gave Pelé 72.75%.
FIFA printed two awards. Maradona left the gala in Rome before Pelé collected his.
Widen the frame that far and Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, Alfredo Di Stéfano and Lev Yashin all have cases that have nothing to do with either of them.
Widen the question to all of football and the pair become two names among 32. Play it →
## The shirt, treated as a job description
Twelve players are ranked here on how they wore the number 10 at a World Cup, and Pelé and Maradona are the two most people name first.
Pelé wore it for Brazil across four tournaments between 1958 and 1970. Maradona wore it for Argentina across four between 1982 and 1994, and Napoli retired the number in 2000 rather than hand it to anybody else.
Zinedine Zidane has a claim the shirt alone does not explain: France's 10 in the 1998 win and again in the 2006 run to the final.
Michel Platini, Rivaldo, Roberto Baggio and Rivelino fill out a list where the number is the only thing every entry has in common.
The shirt both men wore, treated here as a job description. Play it →
## Two entries, one number
This ranking asks which player-and-number pairing is the most iconic in football, across 23 options. Two of those options are the same number: Pelé #10 and Maradona #10.
The collision is the point. Both men made the same two digits mean "the best player in this team" — in different decades, on different continents, for different reasons.
Every other number on the list belongs to one man: Cruyff's 14, Ronaldo's 9, Beckenbauer's 5, Paolo Maldini's 3, Gianluigi Buffon's 1.
Five more 10s are here too — Messi, Zidane, Ronaldinho, Platini and Baggio — which is a fair measure of how much room those two left behind them.
Two entries on this list are the same number. Play it →
## One continent, twenty names
Narrowing the field to South America makes the argument harder, not easier. Pelé and Maradona are both on this list of twenty, alongside most of the players either of them ever faced.
Pelé's case here is volume: 643 goals in 656 games for Santos, 77 in 92 for Brazil, three World Cups.
Maradona's is a decade in which he was plainly the best footballer alive, and one tournament nobody else on the continent can match.
Then there is Alfredo Di Stéfano, who won five European Cups in a row; Garrincha, who won the 1962 World Cup after Pelé was injured in the second match; and Lionel Messi, who holds more Ballons d'Or than anyone. Elías Figueroa won South American Footballer of the Year three times, from centre back.
One continent, twenty names, and the argument starts at the top. Play it →
## The skill, taken on its own
Strip away trophies, goals and captaincy, leave only beating a man with the ball, and this ranking of twenty is what remains. Pelé and Maradona are both in it.
Maradona's evidence is that 1986 run against England: five players beaten between the halfway line and the goal, in about ten seconds.
Pelé's is quoted less and is more technical — the 1970 dummy on Uruguay's goalkeeper Ladislao Mazurkiewicz, where he ran one side of the ball and collected it on the other without touching it.
The list then works through Garrincha, Cruyff, George Best and Ronaldinho before arriving at Lamine Yamal, who won the 2026 World Cup with Spain at 19.
One skill, taken on its own, across six decades of specialists. Play it →
## Measured by height instead
This ranking sorts footballers by an attribute nobody chooses: being short. Pelé and Maradona both qualify.
Maradona was 1.65 m and built his game on it: a centre of gravity low enough that defenders committed before he did.
Pelé was 1.73 m, which was unremarkable for a forward in 1958 and counts as small now.
The company is Xavi, Andrés Iniesta, Luka Modrić, N'Golo Kanté and Messi at 1.70 m — a list where Pelé and Maradona are two names in the crowd rather than the reason the crowd exists.
Rank them by height instead of honours and the company changes completely. Play it →
## The club one of them changed permanently
Only one of the two men can be ranked here. Pelé never played a club game in Europe; Maradona spent seven seasons at Napoli.
He arrived in 1984 and won the club's first two Serie A titles, in 1987 and 1990, plus the UEFA Cup in 1989. Napoli did not win the league again until 2023.
His 115 goals in 259 games stood as the club record until Marek Hamšík passed it in 2017 — and Hamšík needed 478 appearances to do it.
Nine days after Maradona died in November 2020, the ground was renamed Stadio Diego Armando Maradona. Edinson Cavani, Hamšík and Lorenzo Insigne are all on this list, and none of them has a stadium.
A list Pelé cannot appear on, because he never played a club game in Europe. Play it →
## The club the other one never left
Maradona played for six clubs on two continents. Pelé, for practical purposes, played for one, and this is it.
He was at Santos from 1956 to 1974 and scored 643 goals in 656 games, winning ten Campeonato Paulista titles, two Copa Libertadores and two Intercontinental Cups.
Staying meant the Libertadores was his European Cup — the biggest competition open to a player who never left São Paulo.
Neymar, Robinho, Coutinho and Rodrygo all came out of the same academy and left for Europe in their early twenties, which is why eighteen years at Santos is not a record anyone is going to threaten.
The mirror image: one club, eighteen years, 643 goals. Play it →
## A list with only one of them on it
This ranking is Brazil only, so Maradona is not eligible for it. Pelé is the reason it is difficult.
He scored 77 goals in 92 caps and held the national record for six decades, until Neymar passed it against Bolivia in September 2023.
Garrincha, Ronaldo, Zico, Romário and Rivaldo are all here, and Garrincha complicates it most: Pelé was injured in Brazil's second match of the 1962 World Cup, Brazil won the tournament anyway, and Garrincha was the reason.
Maradona's equivalent list is Argentina's, where he scored 34 goals in 91 caps. He is absent from this one, and the absence carries as much argument as any placement could.
Change the flag and one of them stops being eligible. Play it →
## The trophy neither of them ever lifted
The European Cup is missing from both careers, and only Maradona is on this list of the players who never won it.
He spent nine years in Europe: Barcelona from 1982, Napoli until 1991, Sevilla until 1993. He never won the European Cup, and the 1989 UEFA Cup was the second-tier competition.
Pelé is absent because he never entered it. A whole career in Brazil put the tournament out of reach, which is either a much bigger gap or no gap at all, depending on how you want to count it.
Gianluigi Buffon lost three finals with Juventus. Zlatan Ibrahimović, Francesco Totti and Roberto Baggio are here too — good evidence that this trophy is a poor way to rank footballers and an excellent way to start an argument.
The gap in both careers, and only one of them is on the list. Play it →
## The argument does not settle
Pelé and Maradona are separated by the question, not by the answer. Ask who won more World Cups and you get one name; ask who carried a single tournament, or a single city, and you get the other; ask about Copa América or the European Cup and you get neither. FIFA spent a year trying to settle it in 2000 and ended up printing two awards. It's the same trick behind every ranking here — judging things [two at a time](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison).
All 13 rankings, in one place:
- [The 17 Greatest World Cup Goals of All Time](/ranking/the-17-greatest-world-cup-goals-of-all-time)
- [The 28 Greatest World Cup Players of All Time](/ranking/the-28-greatest-world-cup-players-of-all-time)
- [Who is the best player in Copa América history?](/ranking/who-is-the-best-player-in-copa-america-history)
- [Who is the best soccer legend?](/ranking/who-is-the-best-soccer-legend)
- [The 12 Greatest No. 10s in World Cup History](/ranking/the-12-greatest-no-10s-in-world-cup-history)
- [What is the most iconic player-jersey number combination in football history?](/ranking/what-is-the-most-iconic-player-jersey-number-combination-in-football-history)
- [The 20 Greatest South American Footballers of All Time](/ranking/the-20-greatest-south-american-footballers-of-all-time)
- [Top 20 Dribblers in Football History](/ranking/top-20-dribblers-in-football-history)
- [The 15 Best Short Footballers of All Time](/ranking/the-15-best-short-footballers-of-all-time)
- [Who is the best Napoli player of all time?](/ranking/who-is-the-best-napoli-player-of-all-time)
- [Who is the best Santos FC player of all time?](/ranking/who-is-the-best-santos-fc-player-of-all-time)
- [Who is the best player in Brazil national team history?](/ranking/who-is-the-best-player-in-brazil-national-team-history)
- [The 12 Greatest Footballers to Never Win the Champions League](/ranking/the-12-greatest-footballers-to-never-win-the-champions-league)
Pick the question you actually care about, and vote it out.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Messi vs Ronaldo, Ranked Side by Side](/articles/messi-vs-ronaldo-ranked) — the same argument, one generation on
- [Lionel Messi, Ranked 16 Different Ways](/articles/lionel-messi-ranked-many-ways) — the third name in every greatest-ever list
- [Real Madrid vs Barcelona: 8 Rankings, One Argument](/articles/real-madrid-vs-barcelona-ranked) — the same format, clubs instead of players
