Married three times and the father of seven children, Pele’s personal life was not as hectic as that of Diego Maradona, but it was not calm either, writes AFP.

“King” Pele admitted that he has seven children, one less than Maradona. But just like his eternal Argentine rival, the Brazilian’s life has its gray areas.

He did not want to recognize the child

He refused to acknowledge his daughter, Sandra Machado, who was born in 1964 from a relationship with a maid.

After five years of litigation, the courts ruled in favor of the young woman in 1996. She wrote a book about it, The Girl the King Didn’t Want, before dying of breast cancer in 2006 at the age of 42.

His two nephews later chided Pele for “abandoning them intellectually, morally and materially”.

From his first marriage to Rosemary Cholby in 1966, three children were born: two daughters, Kelly Christina in 1967 and Jennifer in 1978, and a son Edinho in 1970.

During this period, Pele also had a daughter, Flavia, who was the result of an extramarital affair in 1968 with journalist Lenita Kurtz. Unlike Sandra Machado, he recognized her in 2002.

The “official” family moved to New York in 1975, after Pele’s move to the Cosmos. Three children remained with their mother after their parents divorced in the early 1980s.

Unmarried, Pele fell in love with Xuxa, a professional model. She then became a television star in Brazil, hosting youth programs, then forming a relationship with another idol of the country, Ayrton Senna.

Pele, absent father of three children from his first marriage

“When I lived in the United States, I hardly spoke to my father,” Edinho told Canal Fotbal Club in 2020. – I saw him only two or three times a year, on birthdays and Christmas. Many times he made an appointment for us and did not come,” he says.

When he returned to Brazil at the age of 16, Pele’s son moved closer to his father and began a modest career as a goalkeeper. But it was mostly his legal failures that made him famous.

Sentenced in 2017 to nearly 13 years in prison for laundering drug money, he was in and out of prison several times before being granted parole in late 2019. He is currently the technical director of the Londrina football club from the state of Paraná (South). ).

Second and third marriages

Pele’s second marriage with psychologist and gospel singer Assyria Lemos Seixas took place in 1994. Two years later, they became the parents of twins Joshua and Celeste. The couple broke up after thirteen years of relationship. In 2020, his ex-wife sued him for non-payment of alimony.

In 2016, at the age of 75, Pele married for the third time Marcia Sibele Aoki, a 42-year-old businesswoman whom he met in New York in the 1980s and then met again in an elevator in Sao Paulo in 2010 year .Soyuz, which the football legend described as “ultimate love”.