I have been looking at Pelé signatures again today. Mostly the later ones. Not just from photos. Actual pieces in hand. That matters.
Some late Pelé signatures are not pretty in the way people expect. The shape is still there, the name still reads right, but the line can look heavy. Slow. Tired, almost.
Silver marker on the green number 10
That is the part I keep coming back to.
On yellow Brazil shirts, especially when the silver signature sits on the green printed number 10, the autograph can look rough. Silver marker does not always move nicely over that surface. It drags. Sometimes it skips. The print fights the pen a bit.
So comparing that to a clean black signature on a glossy photo feels wrong to me.
A jersey is not paper
A jersey is not paper: It moves under the hand. The fabric pulls. The printed number has its own texture. And if the signature is from a later period, I would not expect it to look like a catalogue example.
Some of these shirts look strange at first. Not fake straight away. Just… strange.
The signature can look heavy, uneven, sometimes even ugly. Then you look again. The silver pen. The green number underneath. The fabric. Some parts suddenly make more sense.
I keep coming back to these late Pelé signatures.
The Muhammad Ali comparison
They are not always clean. They are not always nice-looking. But sometimes the roughness fits the shirt better than a perfect signature would.
I also think about Muhammad Ali when I see signatures like this. Not because Pelé and Ali are the same case. They are not. But collectors know that a signature can change when the person changes. With Ali, nobody expects the later signatures to look like the early ones. The weakness became part of the period.
With Pelé it feels more subtle. Some are bad. Some are wrong. Some are fake.
But some collectors reject late examples too quickly because they are looking for the clean Pelé signature they already have in their head.
That is not always what a real signed shirt gives you. Some late silver signatures on the green number are messy. Some look broken. Some look almost too weak at first.
But I would rather look twice at that kind of roughness than accept a signature just because it looks clean. A clean signature is not always the safer one.