Pelé would be a top 10 player in the world today. He was futuristic for his era in a way that's probably never going to be repeated, and i'm not sure how many people actually appreciate that. In a way, you could say Pelé was so great because he was a 2000s athlete playing in the 60s. He was the equivalent to football of Usain Bolt to sprinting
And he is the best player ever looked at it from an empirical perspective. Pace, speed, IQ, technical skill, strenght, aerial prowess, strong foot, weak foot, vision, passing, playmaking, scoring, etc. On a scale of 1 to 10, he was a 10 at everything. He also was the best big game player of the bunch, he basically never had a poor big game on his career that he wasn't injured in or through. His domination of the 1970 World Cup, playing for that Brazil, at 29 and thinking of retirement, and still visibly being so far above everybody else he might as well be playing a completely different sport - and this is something pretty much all of his contemporaries said whenever they were asked about him, or to compare him to X player - brace in the WC semifinal, brace on the WC at 17 years old in 1958...his record against european sides, his record in the libertadores...Messi and Maradona have blemishes on their CVs. Pelé does not.
Having said that, to declare the best between Pelé, Maradona and Messi is impossible and frankly pointless. For me, Maradona is the one closest to my heart, and I think the level he reached at Mexico '86 is the highest anyone had ever played at, given it was a world cup and everything. So for me Maradona comes first, always. Then Pelé and Messi
Cristiano was never at their level