Turin: The Global Club and the Local City
I went to Turin carrying two Juventus shirts and expecting to find Juventus everywhere. Instead, I found another football club, a city built around machines, and a Subbuteo shop that made me reconsider what it means to play.
I didn’t go to Turin looking for World Club.
At the time, World Club didn’t really exist. Not in the way I understand it now, anyway. I was in the city for work, and like most trips I had a few things I wanted to see while I was there.
I did, however, pack two Juventus shirts.
One was a Zidane shirt.
The idea was simple: take them to the Juventus stadium and photograph them there. It was the kind of thing I had started doing almost instinctively — taking an object associated with a player, club or place and returning it to the location it represented.
At the time I didn’t think much more deeply about it than that.
Looking back, I probably should have.
Because almost everything that happened afterwards became a lesson in the difference between how sport exists in our imagination and how it exists in a city.
Torino
One of the first things we found in Turin was a football stadium.
Not the Juventus stadium.
Torino.
We were just walking around the city when we came across the Stadio Olimpico Grande Torino.
That immediately felt significant.
We hadn’t planned a visit. We hadn’t travelled across the city specifically to see it. The stadium simply appeared as part of Turin.
There were apartment blocks around it. Roads. Shops. People going about their lives.
It felt embedded in the neighbourhood.
That physical relationship between a football club and its surroundings is difficult to quantify, but you recognise it immediately when you experience it.
The stadium belongs to the city because the city seems to continue around it.
I knew Torino as a football club, of course, and knew some of its history, but being there changed the relationship slightly.
Suddenly Torino felt less like the second name on the Turin football map and more like something genuinely local.
And that feeling became even stronger once I started looking for Juventus.
Juventus
Juventus is one of the biggest football clubs in the world.
The black-and-white shirt might be one of the most instantly recognisable pieces of football design ever created.
Baggio.
Del Piero.
Zidane.
Nedvěd.
Buffon.
Pirlo.
Ronaldo.
For anyone who grew up watching European football, Juventus existed far beyond Turin.
Which made what happened next strange.
I barely saw Juventus in Turin.
I don’t remember seeing people walking around the city in Juventus shirts.
That sounds almost impossible.
Go to London, Paris or almost any major European city and at some point you will probably see someone wearing Juventus.
Yet in Turin, during the week I spent there, the club felt surprisingly absent from street level.
Of course, that is only my experience of one week in one city. It isn’t a survey of Turin’s supporters.
But it was noticeable.
And when I posted something about Juventus before my gig, some of the responses I received suggested that the relationship between the club and the city was more complicated than I had assumed.
Then we went to the stadium.
I had my shirts ready.
This was supposed to be the obvious photograph.
Zidane. Juventus. Turin.
But when we arrived, I couldn’t really find the photograph.
The stadium felt completely detached from its surroundings.
There was nowhere obvious to stand. There wasn’t the kind of street scene I had imagined. I couldn’t find a natural relationship between the shirt, the stadium and the city.
Eventually we went inside the club shop.
And suddenly Juventus appeared.
Everything was immaculate.
Shirts. Merchandise. Branding.
The entire visual language of one of the world’s largest football institutions.
Kenan Yıldız was there signing shirts as part of the launch of the club’s new kit.
There were supporters waiting. Phones out. New shirts being bought. Autographs. Photos.
For a moment, the global Juventus I knew was completely visible again.
But it was inside the shop.
Torino had appeared while walking through Turin.
Juventus appeared once we entered Juventus.
Which Club Belongs to the City?
There is an obvious danger in drawing too much from that experience.
Juventus has enormous support in Turin and across Piedmont. A few days walking around a city cannot tell you who its people support.
But World Club isn’t really interested in proving that one club is more authentic than another.
How does a sports club become physically present in a place?
There is global belonging and there is local belonging.
They overlap, but they aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Juventus belongs to millions of people who have never been to Turin.
Someone in Lagos, London, Seoul or São Paulo might have followed Juventus since childhood. They might own ten Juventus shirts. Their memories of Zidane or Del Piero might be as meaningful as those of someone born a few kilometres from the stadium.
That relationship is real.
But Torino offered something different.
The club felt tied to geography.
Its stadium sat inside the rhythm of the city.
You could stumble across it.
Perhaps that is one difference between a global club and a local club.
One travels towards the supporter.
The other waits to be discovered in the place itself.
The City of Machines
Football wasn’t the only sport that kept appearing.
Turin’s other great mythology is the motor car.
Fiat.
Lancia.
Ferrari.
Italian engineering.
Industrial design.
We went to the Museo Nazionale dell’Automobile, and suddenly another version of sporting culture appeared.
Formula One cars. Ferraris. Racing machines.
Logos and liveries that have become as recognisable as football shirts.
Once you start looking at motorsport through the same lens as football, the similarities become obvious.
Colours. Teams. Heroes. Rivalries. Manufacturers. Objects. Collecting. Nostalgia.
People can recognise a Ferrari racing car from a particular period in exactly the way someone else can recognise an Arsenal shirt from 1991.
Both objects contain memory.
And in Turin, the connection between sport and industry felt especially strong.
Football clubs are often described as products of their cities, but factories can be too.
Fiat didn’t simply manufacture cars in Turin.
It helped shape the city’s identity.
Perhaps sporting culture is rarely isolated from the industries, politics and communities that surround it.
A football club. A car company. A stadium. A factory.
Different institutions can end up telling different versions of the same city.
Subbuteo
Then I found the Subbuteo shop.
That might have been the biggest surprise of the trip.
I hadn’t thought seriously about Subbuteo for years.
For me it belonged to another period.
Before FIFA. Before PlayStation. Before football games became enormous digital simulations with licences, transfer markets, Ultimate Team packs and online communities.
Subbuteo was football reduced to its most basic components.
A pitch.
Two goals.
Twenty-two miniature players.
Your fingers.
Your imagination.
I walked into the shop assuming I was entering somewhere dedicated to nostalgia.
Instead, the owner asked me a very simple question.
Do you still play?
I said no.
I told him that I had moved onto computer games, although by that point I didn’t really play those anymore either.
Then he explained that Subbuteo hadn’t disappeared at all.
People were still playing competitively.
There were leagues. Tournaments. Communities.
He told me about players and gatherings around South London and Surrey that I should check out when I got home.
I left slightly stunned.
Somewhere along the way I had decided Subbuteo was an object from childhood.
Other people had simply continued playing it.
That distinction feels important.
Sport is increasingly something we consume.
We watch it. Stream it. Photograph it. Buy it. Collect it. Wear it. Post about it.
Sometimes we forget that sport is also something people do.
Subbuteo occupies a strange space between those worlds.
It is a collectible object that only really comes alive when somebody flicks it across a table.
Objects
Looking back at the photographs from Turin now, what surprises me is how many objects I documented.
Shirts. Cars. Football memorabilia. Subbuteo teams. Club merchandise. Stadiums.
At the time they were just interesting things I encountered during a trip.
Now they look like the beginnings of an archive.
That is probably one of the ideas behind World Club.
Objects are useful because they allow us to carry places with us.
A Zidane Juventus shirt can connect someone in London with Turin twenty-five years after Zidane left the club.
A miniature Subbuteo team can carry the memory of playing football on a dining-room table.
A Ferrari can represent engineering, national identity, childhood fascination and sport simultaneously.
But an object is never the whole story.
Sometimes taking the object back to its supposed point of origin makes the story more complicated.
That was what happened with my Juventus shirt.
I travelled to Turin expecting the shirt and the city to connect perfectly.
They didn’t.
And that failure became far more interesting than the photograph I had planned.
Turin
I went to Turin expecting Juventus.
I found Torino.
I expected football.
I found cars.
I expected nostalgia.
I found people still playing Subbuteo.
And I went carrying objects without really understanding why I kept doing it.
A few months later, World Club started to make sense.
The question underneath it was becoming clearer:
How does sport help people belong to places?
Turin offered several possible answers.
Sometimes belonging is created through a neighbourhood.
Sometimes through an industrial history.
Sometimes through a shirt worn thousands of kilometres away.
Sometimes through twenty-two tiny plastic footballers on a tabletop.
And sometimes the most useful thing you can discover about a place is that the relationship you expected to find isn’t there at all.