  The quantum statistical approach proposed more than one decade ago was used
to determine the parton distributions for the proton by considering a large set
of accurate Deep Inelastic Scattering experimental results. We propose to
extend this work to extract the parton distributions for the pion by using data
on lepton pair production from various experiments. This global next-to-leading
order QCD analysis leads to a good description of several Drell-Yan $\pi^- W$
data. The resulting parton distributions are compared with earlier
determinations. We will also discuss the difference between nucleon and pion
structure in the same approach.
