Qatar 2022: The story of how Pele became a World Cup legend

When Pelé headed to Sweden for the 1958 World Cup finals, he was still over four months short of his 18th birthday, and just two years on from being handed his first professional contract by his club side, Santos.

So prodigious was his unbridled talent, it had taken Pelé only ten months to travel the distance between his debut for Santos and his first representation for Brazil, when still only at the age of 16 he took to the Maracanã to make a goalscoring contribution in a 2-1 defeat at the hands of Argentina.

With strength and power that seemed beyond his tender years, Pelé was blessed with not only bewitching skills, but also a magical sense of balance and timing, to go along with focus, discipline, and a self-determination that was impossible for anybody else to replicate.

Brazil was not short of attacking players that possessed the most outrageous skills imaginable, with the legendary Garrincha at the apex of a very big pyramid, but not one of them boasted the broad ranging package that Pelé possessed.

After making his international bow against Argentina, Pelé would play for Brazil a further four times before the big kick off in Sweden, with the rotund, but visionary Vicente Feola making the now 17-year-old the youngest member of his 22-man squad.

By 1958, the World Cup had become a seemingly insurmountable mental block for Brazil.

In attendance for every finals tournament since the World Cup's inception, the semi-final had been reached in 1938, when the iconic Leônidas da Silva inspired his teammates to a third-placed finish, after narrowly being edged out in the last-four by the holders, Italy, and having survived the infamous Battle of Bordeaux in the quarter-final against Czechoslovakia.

Denied by World War 2 of