In Pictures: Football Around the World
As the World Cup 2018 kicks off, we take a look at the diverse terrain where football matches have taken place, such as prison yards, war zones, deserts, city streets and mountain sides
Magnum Photographers
On Thursday June 14, 2018, Russia and Saudi Arabia will play in the first match of the Russia 2018 World Cup, soon followed by Egypt v Uruguay, Morocco v Iran and Portugal v Spain the next day. As the attention of football fans from all corners of the globe turns to Russia, we take a look at how football has been, and continues to be, played around the world on well-worn suburban patches of grass, punctuated by goal posts, to the kick-abouts played in urban back yards, 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’.
To mark the World Cup, a curation of posters featuring football have been released on the Magnum Shop. See the collection and buy posters for $49 here.
