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. (read more)