{"id":114479,"date":"2026-07-22T07:06:37","date_gmt":"2026-07-22T07:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/114479\/"},"modified":"2026-07-22T07:06:37","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T07:06:37","slug":"ai-recreates-the-goal-pele-said-was-his-greatest-ever-but-wasnt-filmed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/114479\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Recreates the Goal Pel\u00e9 Said Was His Greatest Ever But Wasn’t Filmed"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Google\u2019s DeepMind lab has recreated Pel\u00e9\u2019s so-called lost goal \u2014 a strike that the iconic Brazilian soccer player said was his best-ever but was never captured on video. <\/p>\n

It was August 2, 1959, and Pel\u00e9\u2019s team, Santos, was playing against Clube Atl\u00e9tico Juventus at the Javari Stadium in S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil. Much to the amazement of the gathered fans, Pel\u00e9 performed three straight sombrero flicks past the defenders, before executing a knee flick to take it past the goalkeeper, and finally heading the ball into the empty net. <\/p>\n

Pel\u00e9, who reportedly scored thousands of goals in his career, called this one his best-ever goal, which makes it all the more galling that it was never filmed. A photographer did manage to capture a shot of Pel\u00e9 heading the ball as the opposition defenders looked on. <\/p>\n

Google and creative agency SpecialGuest\/SGx used that photo, taken by Raphael Herrera, as one of many prompts into a complex web of AI models. The team sought historical accuracy by speaking to people who had witnessed the goal. They used Gemini Omni, a multimodal AI model, to create an accurate picture of what it was like in 1959 S\u00e3o Paulo. <\/p>\n

\"BlackThe photo taken by Raphael Herrera. \"Left:Photographer Raphael Herrera.<\/p>\n

But to really recreate the goal Pel\u00e9 scored that day, Google sent a film crew to Javari Stadium \u2014 which is still standing in S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s Mooca neighborhood \u2014 and hired local actors to don 1950s soccer jerseys. <\/p>\n

For movies or video games, actors typically wear motion-cap suits. Instead of that, Google used a model called Performance Control, which takes an input video and produces 3D blue-mesh renderings of the people in the video. Performance Control then uses that data to transfer the motion of the players onto the AI video. <\/p>\n

As well as wearing the same jerseys, the team also sourced a leather ball, which was the type of ball made out of heavier materials in the mid-20th century. <\/p>\n

\u201cAll these AI tools, they\u2019re such amplifiers of our imagination,\u201d says Tom Murray, a research engineer at Google DeepMind. \u201cIt allows us to really explore and experiment in a way we\u2019ve just never been able to.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"AThe AI recreation of Pel\u00e9\u2019s lost goal. <\/p>\n

The resulting AI footage, which starts at 6:50 in the video above, is the best depiction of Pel\u00e9\u2019s wonder goal that isn\u2019t the Raphael Herrera photograph. It is now on display at the Pel\u00e9 Museum in Santos.<\/p>\n

Recreating events that were never recorded is an intriguing use case for AI; a few years back, photojournalist Michael Christopher Brown used AI<\/a> to imagine pictures of Cubans fleeing to the U.S. <\/p>\n

Update 7\/21: Updated with name of the creative agency. <\/p>\n

Image creditsGoogle<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google\u2019s DeepMind lab has recreated Pel\u00e9\u2019s so-called lost goal \u2014 a strike that the iconic Brazilian soccer player…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114480,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[3257,5044,51763,294,132,7543,58484,58485,58486,58487,20299],"class_list":["post-114479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-brazil","tag-deepmind","tag-geminiomni","tag-genai","tag-google","tag-google-deepmind","tag-googledeepmind","tag-googlegemini","tag-pele","tag-recreate","tag-soccer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114479"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114479\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}