4. Brazil 5-2 Sweden (1958)
Pele who? The teenager was already a superstar in Brazil, netting goals at an incredible rate and becoming his country’s youngest ever scorer, but the forward was not unleashed on the wider footballing world until the quarter-final stage at the 1958 World Cup after arriving in Sweden with a knee injury.
He netted against Wales and then bagged a second-half hat-trick against France in the semi-finals, with his legend cemented in the final.
Pele, the 17-year-old with number 10 etched on his makeshift blue shirt, scored twice in a 5-2 win – the highest-scoring World Cup final on record.
His first remains one of the showpiece’s all-time great goals, taking the ball on his chest and lofting it over a defender before volleying into the bottom corner.
It was Brazil’s first World Cup triumph, and Pele delivered on a promise he made to his father after the ‘Maracanazo’ in 1950, when Uruguay stunned Brazil in Rio.
“I remember seeing him sitting next to the radio, sobbing,” Pele later told Fifa. “And he said to me, ‘Brazil have lost the World Cup’.
“I remember jokingly saying to him, ‘Don’t cry, dad – I’ll win the World Cup for you’.”
