In Pictures: Football Around the World
We take a look at the diverse terrain where football matches have taken place, such as prison yards, war zones, deserts, city streets and mountainsides
Magnum Photographers
Here we take a look at how football can bring people and communities together, from matches on well-worn suburban patches of grass, to kick-abouts played in urban backyards, to matches held amongst ancient ruins or towering mountain vistas.
Marilyn Silverstone’s 1959 photograph of the Bhilai Russian Steel Plant in India depicts the the complex the Russian workers would both live and spend their leisure time in. A game of football takes places beneath clouds of smoke from the adjacent Blooming plant; Abbas captures a traffic-stopping impromptu outbreak of simultaneous football matches in Tehran; Thomas Hoepker photographs children playing with a football next to a barbed-wire-lined Berlin Wall in 1963; Jean Gaumy stands goalside for a prison football match; Bruce Gilden photographs his daughter’s ball control as she weaves through pavement traffic on New York City’s streets; Philip Jones Griffiths captures a lone figure dribbling a ball as he’s trailed by an armored tank in Greneda; and Elliott Erwitt finds a goal manned by a monk, amongst our edit of surprising, unusual and picturesque spots where Magnum photographers have photographed the ‘beautiful game’.
