Tag: Football Shirts

Signals World Club

SIGNALS 002

Post author By GRIN
Post date November 2, 2026

WORLD CLUB / SIGNALS 002
October 2026

Who gets to shape sporting culture?

Things we noticed. Connections worth following.

Sport is increasingly being made somewhere beyond the field.

This month, Lamine Yamal turned Barcelona into the launch site for an American Eagle collection carrying the number of his Rocafonda neighbourhood. McLaren handed six decades of racing history to Central Saint Martins students and asked them to turn it into fashion. Paris Saint-Germain commissioned a painting that travelled from Art Basel through the Paris Metro and onto a football shirt.

Elsewhere, women gained access to machinery, equipment, leagues and salaries that sporting systems were not originally designed around. Brazil prepared for a Women’s World Cup while debating what its legacy should actually be. Saudi football continued a rapid transformation spanning both women’s participation and club ownership.

Formula 1 committed to returning to Africa. Brazil finally arrived in a city that had been imagining Brazilian football for generations. Individually, these stories look very different. Together, they suggest something bigger: sporting culture is no longer shaped only by clubs, federations and broadcasters.

01 — The Athlete as Cultural Platform

Lamine Yamal takes over Barcelona

Lamine Yamal’s American Eagle collection was more than a familiar athlete endorsement. The collection carried 304, the number Yamal has repeatedly used to reference Rocafonda, the neighbourhood where he grew up. Its Barcelona launch expanded beyond clothing into the city itself: art, music, physical installations and public space became part of the release.

The interesting thing is how consistently place travels with Yamal. Rocafonda is not being discarded as his global profile grows. It is becoming part of the language through which that profile is expressed.

When does an athlete stop representing a brand and start becoming a cultural platform of their own?

Further reading: VERSUS — Lamine Yamal launches his American Eagle collection with a Barcelona takeover

Black athletes and the authorship of style

A Guardian exploration of Black athletes and fashion places contemporary athlete collaborations inside a much longer history. From Florence Griffith Joyner and Allen Iverson to Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, clothing has repeatedly allowed athletes to negotiate the tension between sporting uniformity and individual identity.

Rather than treating fashion as something added to sport afterwards, this history suggests that sporting dress has long been part of arguments about race, control, conformity and self-expression.

Further reading: The Guardian — Dress good to run fast: how Black athletes became style icons

The boot can arrive before the boot

Kylian Mbappé’s developing relationship with On offers another version of athlete influence. New On football boots appeared on Mbappé in EA SPORTS FC 27 material before the wider physical football range had properly reached consumers.

prototype → athlete → video game → social circulation → physical object

For some supporters, the first meaningful encounter with a new sporting product can now happen inside a virtual football world. The video game no longer simply reproduces football culture. It can participate in launching it.

02 — When Sport Becomes Creative Material

McLaren hands its history to Central Saint Martins

McLaren invited 46 Central Saint Martins MA Fashion students to reinterpret six decades of racing history. Working in 12 groups, the students created original looks drawing on different eras of McLaren: racing colours, engineering, materials, aerodynamic forms and the visual identities of figures including James Hunt and Ayrton Senna.

The important distinction is that this was not primarily a merchandise exercise. McLaren treated its own sporting history as creative source material.

The sporting archive is becoming raw material for culture.

Further reading: McLaren — Designed to Race

What happens when the artwork leaves the gallery?

For Art Basel Paris 2026, Paris Saint-Germain commissioned Paris-born painter Nadjib Ben Ali to create Et on dansera. The painting did not remain inside the art fair. It travelled through Paris, including selected Metro stations, before reaching the Parc des Princes, where PSG players wore a pre-match jersey inspired by the work.

painting → Art Basel → city → Metro → shirt → stadium → collectible

Football is not merely being depicted by the artwork. Football becomes one of the systems through which the artwork circulates. Paris itself becomes part of the exhibition.

What happens when an artwork stops representing football and starts moving through football culture?

Further reading: Paris Saint-Germain — With Art Basel, Paris Saint-Germain brings art to the heart of the capital

Artists design the objects of fandom

CULTURED has been documenting a wider shift. Artists are no longer simply making artwork about sport. Their practices are entering jerseys, trophies, merchandise, sneakers and collectible objects.

The relationship is changing from sport → artist depicts sport towards artist → shapes how sport is worn and collected.

Further reading: CULTURED — How Artist-Driven Sports Merch Became Big Business On and Off the Court

When creativity reaches the limits of identity

Some clubs are beginning to define how far visual reinvention should go. Hertha BSC published a formal kit manifesto developed with staff, members and fan representatives, while Benfica already protects elements of its kit identity through club statutes.

The tension is not simply tradition versus creativity. It is about authority. A manufacturer may see a shirt as a surface for experimentation. A supporter may see the same shirt as inherited visual territory.

How much can a football shirt change before it stops feeling like the club?

Further reading: Footy Headlines — From Hertha to Benfica: Football Clubs Are Introducing Kit Rules to Protect Tradition

03 — Who Is Sport Designed For?

Being allowed to participate is only one form of access. The deeper question is whether the pathways, products, institutions and rules of sport were designed with you in mind.

Patricia Sáiz reaches Rally1

Seven years after beginning her involvement in rallying, Patricia Sáiz made her World Rally Championship debut alongside Dani Sordo in a factory Hyundai Rally1 car. Elite motorsport experience cannot be recreated theoretically. Someone eventually has to trust you with the car.

Further reading: DirtFish — The co-driver making her WRC debut in a Rally1 car

Jamie Chadwick gets F1 mileage

Jamie Chadwick completed 32 laps of Portimão in Williams’ FW47. The significance is not merely symbolic. Testing provides technical knowledge, physical experience, data and understanding that cannot be obtained outside the machine.

Representation at the highest level begins much earlier than the starting grid. It begins with access to kilometres.

Further reading: Williams — Jamie Chadwick completes Portimão test in FW47

From nowhere to play to a professional league

Less than a decade ago, women could not attend football matches inside Saudi stadiums. In 2022, the Saudi Women’s Premier League began. Bloomberg Businessweek follows Al-Ittihad player Bayan Sadagah through that transformation, from informal football and development in Egypt to a professional league at home.

What was unavailable as a spectator experience has become a professional pathway.

Further reading: Bloomberg Businessweek — Eight Years Ago, Saudi Women Couldn’t Attend Football Matches. Now They’re Playing in Them

What if the shoe was never designed for you?

Natalie White reached her final year at Boston College before fully confronting something that had been normal throughout her basketball life: she had spent years playing in shoes primarily designed around male athletes.

White responded by founding Moolah Kicks, building basketball footwear specifically around women. That changes the question from “how do we make a women’s version?” to “what would the product look like if women were the starting point?”

Further reading: Bloomberg Businessweek — Female Athletes Are Fed Up Being Gaslit by Sneaker Giants

When a player becomes bigger than the rules

Trinity Rodman’s contract negotiations with Washington Spirit produced another version of the same problem. A proposed agreement ran into the NWSL’s salary structure, followed by the creation of the High Impact Player mechanism.

The issue is bigger than one contract. Women’s sport is reaching the point where commercial growth can begin to strain systems created when revenues, salaries and player values were much smaller.

What happens when the athlete outgrows the economic architecture of the league?

Further reading: Bloomberg Businessweek — Trinity Rodman’s Mega Contract Is Tilting the Playing Field in Women’s Sports

A World Cup legacy is also public policy

Brazil will host the Women’s World Cup in 2027. Ahead of October’s presidential runoff, The Guardian spoke to women footballers concerned about what the election could mean for the structures being built around that tournament.

The wider question remains: who is responsible for creating the conditions in which women’s sport can grow? Clubs? Federations? Markets? Government? Usually, it is some combination of all four.

Further reading: The Guardian — How Brazil’s election result could shape women’s football in the country

Access is not simply about being allowed into sport. It is about whether the pathways, equipment, rules and institutions were designed for you — and whether they can change when you outgrow them.

04 — Sport Is Redrawing Its Map

Formula 1 returns to Africa

Formula 1 has agreed a 10-year deal to race in Rwanda from the early 2030s. It will mark Formula 1’s first World Championship race in Africa since 1993.

That absence makes this larger than another calendar announcement. Formula 1 presents itself as a global championship. Africa’s return forces a more fundamental question: what does global actually mean when an entire inhabited continent has been absent for more than three decades?

Further reading: Formula 1 — Formula 1 returns to Africa with 10-year agreement to race in Rwanda

Brazil existed in Kolkata before Brazil arrived

Brazil’s senior men’s team played India in Kolkata in October. Competitively, the distance between the teams was enormous. Culturally, it was much smaller.

Brazil has occupied a significant place in India’s football imagination for generations, with Kolkata particularly known for World Cup streets, murals, flags and allegiances to Brazil and Argentina. Brazil therefore did not arrive somewhere unfamiliar. They arrived somewhere that had already been imagining Brazil for decades.

Fandom can create sporting geography long before a team physically arrives.

Further reading: AIFF — India’s date with football royalty: Brazil at VYBK

NBA Europe and the argument over structure

Plans for an NBA-backed European competition raise a different geographical question. At stake is not simply whether the NBA can create a successful competition in Europe, but what happens when different sporting systems meet.

European club sport traditionally connects local institutions, domestic leagues and continental competition. The NBA brings a franchise model developed within a very different sporting economy.

Further reading: BasketNews — NBA executive questions EuroLeague structure amid new league push

Saudi football enters another phase

Saudi football’s rapid transformation is also moving into ownership. RedBird Capital Partners has explored a potential investment in Al-Nassr as Saudi Arabia continues its club-privatisation programme.

Viewed alongside the creation of the women’s professional league, it becomes clear that Saudi football is not simply getting bigger. Different parts of its institutional structure are being rebuilt simultaneously.

Global sport is not only expanding geographically. Ownership, pathways and institutions are being reorganised at the same time.

Further reading: Semafor — To prep for sale of Ronaldo’s Saudi team, PIF pays off $213 million debt

05 — The Life of the Sporting Object

What happens to the kit nobody wears?

Elite sport generates enormous quantities of physical material: uniforms, training clothing, ceremonial outfits, shoes and equipment. Not all of it ever reaches competition.

A BBC investigation into unused Team GB clothing followed pristine items from recent Olympic cycles that remained packaged after the event and were later routed towards resale. The sporting moment may last days. The object can last decades.

When does sporting equipment stop being equipment and become surplus, memorabilia, archive or collectible?

Further reading: BBC Sport — What happens to sports kit that never gets worn?

Around the Game

Palmeiras: phones out, books in

Palmeiras has introduced reading spaces at its youth academy while restricting phone use by players and staff during the training-centre routine. The club says the aim is to encourage concentration, cognitive development and interaction.

It expands the definition of what a football academy believes it is responsible for developing. Not simply the player. The person and their attention.

Further reading: Palmeiras — academy reading spaces and phone restrictions

Sources

Follow the story.

SIGNALS begins with things we notice: journalism, photographs, social posts, films, objects, games, newsletters, exhibitions and conversations.

Wherever possible, links lead to the original artist, organisation, club or publisher, even where that source sits behind a paywall. Social posts are treated as discovery points rather than automatic verification. Apple News links are retained internally where useful for capturing stories, but are not used as public Further Reading destinations.

Closing Note

The stories in SIGNALS 002 are not really about sport “crossing over” into culture. That description increasingly feels too simple.

Sport is already one of the places where contemporary culture is being made.

The more useful question is: who gets to participate in making it?

The athlete. The artist. The designer. The supporter. The neighbourhood. The academy. The government. The investor. The game developer. The club.

And sometimes all of them at once.

WORLD CLUB / SIGNALS 002 — October 2026
Things we noticed. Connections worth following.
World Club explores how sport helps people belong to places.
A publication from TheGRIN.io

Tags Football Culture, Football Shirts, football-art, football-design, Women’s Football

Signals World Club

SIGNALS 001

WORLD CLUB / SIGNALS 001 — August 2026

WORLD CLUB / SIGNALS 001 August 2026

Signals 001

Stories, objects, places and ideas we’re picking up from across the sporting world — and what begins to appear when we put them next to each other.

Published by World Club

Part of TheGRIN.io

8-bit collage for WORLD CLUB / SIGNALS 001 featuring football craft, Cabo Verde, a sponsor-covered shirt, a rug tennis court, Medellín and themes of movement and belonging. — WORLD CLUB / SIGNALS 001 — August 2026.

Opening Note

Sport rarely stays inside the lines.

This month, football appeared in carved wood, couture, street paint and neighbourhood basketball courts. Shirts became community funding mechanisms, political statements, fashion objects and cultural passports. A tennis court became a carpet. Artists used sport to reconstruct memories of places they had left. Football pitches became meeting places, memorials and pieces of everyday urban life.

None of these stories necessarily belong together when they first appear in a feed. That is the point of WORLD CLUB / SIGNALS.

Signals collects what catches our attention: stories, photographs, objects, places, ideas and small moments from across sport. Sometimes their meaning is obvious. Sometimes it only becomes visible when one story is placed next to another.

This is edition 001.

Signal 01

Sport Remade Through Place

Global sport gives us standardised objects and spaces: the shirt, the court, the table, the ball. What happens when those forms are rebuilt through local materials, histories and ways of making?

Detail of the hand-carved wooden table football work Legado de Dioses. — Luis Jesús Vázquez Gabriel — *Legado de Dioses*.

Tlaxcala, Mexico

A football table carved into a cultural object

Luis Jesús Vázquez Gabriel spent months creating Legado de Dioses, a fully playable table-football work built through traditional Mexican woodcarving.

The familiar structure of foosball becomes a vessel for mythology, regional craft, material knowledge and cultural inheritance.

It was one of hundreds of works produced for the Copa de Arte Popular Banamex 2026, a project bringing Mexican craft traditions into conversation with football.

Further reading Fomento Cultural Banamex

Tennis players on Jaipur Rugs' Court of Carpets project. — Jaipur Rugs — The Court of Carpets.

Jaipur, India

What if the tennis court stopped being neutral?

Jaipur Rugs transformed a functioning tennis court through carpets, turning the clean geometry of the game into colour, pattern, texture and craft.

The project is interesting precisely because a tennis court is normally so standardised. The dimensions remain recognisable, but the surface suddenly belongs to somewhere.

Further reading Jaipur Rugs — The Court of Carpets

Fola Adeleke concept work reimagining football clothing through African couture. — Fola Adeleke — Reimagining Through African Couture.

African Couture / Concept

Remove performance. What is left of the football shirt?

Designer and concept artist Fola Adeleke asks what football clothing might become if it were inherited through African couture craftsmanship rather than designed primarily for athletic performance.

That shift changes the question. The football garment stops being only equipment and becomes dress, craft, heritage and cultural artefact.

Artist @fola_adeleke

Signal 02

The Shirt Is Never Just a Shirt

The football shirt keeps absorbing new meanings. Community finance, national identity, protest, nostalgia, fashion, design and belonging can all occupy the same piece of cloth.

Deportivo Municipal football shirt carrying hundreds of small sponsor spaces. — Deportivo Municipal — Los Mil Sponsors del Muni.

Lima, Peru

The supporter becomes the sponsor

Deportivo Municipal divided its shirt into hundreds of tiny advertising spaces and invited supporters, neighbourhood businesses and entrepreneurs to buy them.

Instead of depending on one large corporate logo, the shirt became a map of the community helping sustain the club.

The important object is not simply a jersey covered in logos. It is a record of the people who chose to support a club when conventional football finance was failing it.

Project Los Mil Sponsors del Muni

Cabo Verde players with Capelli Sport national-team clothing. — Cabo Verde / Capelli Sport.

Cabo Verde / New Jersey

From one youth team to the World Cup

Capelli Sport began from the practical problem of supplying a youth football team with the uniforms it wanted.

Years later, the company arrived on football’s biggest stage as the technical partner of first-time World Cup participant Cabo Verde.

It is a reminder that the global kit economy is larger than its biggest manufacturers. Some routes to the World Cup begin much closer to grassroots football.

A football shirt as protest material

A group of young Berliners used the visual language of a World Cup shirt as a vehicle for political protest.

It belongs to a longer history of the shirt functioning as public statement: a recognisable sporting object capable of carrying messages far beyond the pitch.

Read The Times / The Sunday Times

England

Sometimes the shirt people want already exists

The Independent looked at the England shirt fans were searching for during the World Cup — and found that desire was not necessarily centred on the current kit.

Sporting clothing has an unusual relationship with time. Older shirts can become stronger symbols as memories accumulate around them.

Read The Independent

World Cup 2026

Can the shirt become circular?

WWD reported on circular jerseys appearing on the field during the World Cup, bringing material lifecycle and sustainability into an object normally judged through design, performance and symbolism.

Read WWD

Football / Fashion

When did football kits start being on-trend?

British GQ asks how football clothing moved beyond the stadium and into the wider fashion cycle.

The more interesting question may be why some designs continue travelling between performance, memory, identity and fashion while others disappear.

Read British GQ

Signal 03

The Pitch as Public Space

Some of the most important sporting places are not stadiums. They are ordinary courts, pitches and streets that become significant because people keep returning to them.

King’s Cross, London

A court can be infrastructure, community and memory

London-born NBA player OG Anunoby is contributing to the redevelopment of the basketball court at Argyle Square.

But the important story existed before the investment. The court had already become a place where people met, played, built friendships and formed a community around the Argyle Kings.

The redevelopment will also carry the memory of Anthony “TJ” Hibbert, a member of that community who died in 2025.

The court is simultaneously sporting surface, meeting place, neighbourhood landmark and memorial.

Football embedded in everyday life

Photographer Scott Groult has spent years documenting football across Cabo Verde.

His images place the game inside ordinary landscapes and communities rather than separating it from them.

Cabo Verde’s arrival on the World Cup stage gives those photographs a new context, but the deeper story is what existed long before the tournament.

Read / view Ori Magazine

Brazil

The World Cup happens in the street

Communities in Brazil have been reviving the tradition of painting streets for the World Cup.

Watching a tournament becomes a collective act of making place: neighbours collaborate, asphalt becomes canvas and the visual language of the national team moves into the everyday landscape.

The practice is particularly interesting because traditions can disappear. A sporting ritual can weaken, be remembered and then be passed to a generation that did not previously experience it.

Sport as Memory and Cultural Material

What changes when sport stops being represented as competition and becomes material for artists, designers and memory?

Patricia Geagea artwork interpreting tennis through expressive colour and landscape. — Patricia Geagea / Entre Deux.

Lebanon / Canada

Tennis as a way of remembering somewhere

Patricia Geagea’s tennis imagery operates somewhere between observation, illustration, memory and dream.

Clay, greenery, white clothing and deep sky become a sensory archive connected to childhood memories of the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon.

The game becomes a route back to a place.

Read Athleta Magazine

Tennis / Style

When tennis stopped dressing like tennis

Andre Agassi’s denim, neon, graphics and basketball-influenced footwear challenged the visual codes traditionally associated with tennis.

The important shift was not simply that one athlete dressed differently. Agassi helped create a visual identity that became larger than performance and remains available for sport and fashion to revisit decades later.

Football as part of ordinary life

Heavener Magazine’s collection of football in art included work by Brazilian painter Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato.

Lorenzato’s wider practice was rooted in everyday observation: neighbourhoods, landscapes, people and ordinary social life.

Football entering that visual world feels important. The game does not have to appear as spectacle. It can simply be part of the cultural landscape.

Discovery Heavener Magazine — El Fútbol en Arte

The man who found “art” in a World Cup final scrap

Another route into the increasingly porous boundary between sporting action and the cultural language used to interpret it.

Read at The Athletic

Signal 05

Movement, Home and Belonging

Sporting identities are increasingly formed across several places at once. Migration, displacement, diaspora and player culture complicate the idea that belonging must fit neatly inside one border.

UNHCR — Gamechangers.

World Cup / Global

Football after displacement

BBC Africa highlighted players at the World Cup whose own lives or family histories have been shaped by forced displacement.

UNHCR’s Gamechanging Team brings together footballers with refugee or displacement backgrounds, including players whose journeys have crossed several countries before reaching a national team.

Their stories resist simple ideas of sporting nationality. A national-team shirt can represent a new home without erasing the places and journeys that came before it.

The shirt as a temporary passport

Lamine Yamal appeared with Colombian artist Ryan Castro in Medellín wearing the Colombia national-team shirt.

Here the shirt does not primarily communicate permanent national allegiance. It functions as participation, recognition and respect for the place and cultural environment the player has entered.

It is also a glimpse of contemporary player identity moving between football, music, fashion, travel and social media without being contained entirely by club or country.

Does football need to be decolonised?

Leon Moosavi’s essay for the World Decolonization Forum examines how colonial histories may continue to shape football’s geography, economics, migration routes, national identities and access to power.

Rather than presenting every proposition as settled fact, the essay is useful as an invitation to ask how the geography of the game came to look the way it does.

Read World Decolonization Forum

Signal 06

Around the Game

A wider reading list of the structures, economies and developments shaping the sporting world around this month’s cultural stories.

ESPN

One year out from the 2027 Women’s World Cup

An early marker for the questions, power structures and narratives forming around the next Women’s World Cup.

Read the story

FIFA

Korea and the foundations of the next generation

Cha Bum-kun and the long work of building pathways capable of sustaining football culture across generations.

Read the story

BBC Sport

More games, more controversy

What the enlarged World Cup gained and lost — and how tournament architecture changes the experience around the football itself.

Read the story

Forbes

The World Cup’s highest-paid players

Elite player economics remain part of understanding how sporting influence now moves between performance, sponsorship and individual brand power.

Read the story

The Telegraph

How sports stars avoid going broke

A look at the infrastructure surrounding athlete wealth as players increasingly operate as businesses, investors and brands as well as competitors.

Read the story

Sources

Follow the story.

Signals begins with things we notice: journalism, photographs, social posts, films, objects, newsletters and conversations.

Wherever possible, links lead to an original project, artist, organisation or supporting editorial source so the story can be explored beyond this page.

Tags Belonging, Cabo Verde, Craft, Diaspora, Football Culture, Football Shirts, Mexico, Migration, Public Space, Sport & Art, Sport & Culture, Sportswear, Tennis Culture, World Cup 2026

World Club

Building Community Through Your Shirt Shop

Post author By GRIN
Post date August 12, 2026
No Comments on Building Community Through Your Shirt Shop

Tags 8-bit games, browser games, Football Collecting, Football Culture, football games, football memorabilia, Football Shirts, gaming, independent games, pixel art, shirt culture, sports games, World Club, World Club Play

Coordinates Field Notes Football Culture World Club

Turin: The Global Club and the Local City

Post author By GRIN
Post date August 8, 2026
No Comments on Turin: The Global Club and the Local City

HERO IMAGE — TURIN / TORINO / STREET VIEW

Turin, May 2026.

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.

IMAGE — STADIO OLIMPICO GRANDE TORINO

Stadio Olimpico Grande Torino. A stadium encountered as part of the city rather than as a destination.

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.

IMAGE — ZIDANE JUVENTUS SHIRT

The Zidane shirt travelled to Turin looking for its photograph.

IMAGE — JUVENTUS STADIUM / EXTERIOR

The stadium proved harder to connect to the surrounding city than expected.

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.

IMAGE — FERRARI / MOTORSPORT / AUTOMOBILE MUSEUM

Sporting identity in Turin extends beyond football into machines, engineering and speed.

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.

IMAGE — SUBBUTEO SHOP / FIGURES / DISPLAY

What looked like nostalgia turned out to be an active sporting culture.

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.

Tags Belonging, Football Shirts, Juventus, Local Identity, Motorsport, Sports Culture, Stadiums, Subbuteo, Supporter Culture, Torino FC, Turin

Field Notes World Club

Brazil, 2023: Before World Club Had a Name | World Club

Post author By GRIN
Post date July 21, 2026
No Comments on Brazil, 2023: Before World Club Had a Name | World Club

World ClubField Notes 000

São Paulo → Salvador, Bahia → Rio de Janeiro → Ubatuba

Brazil, 2023

Before World Club Had a Name

BrazilJuly 2023Field Notes

Sometimes you only understand why a journey mattered years later.
Brazil was not supposed to be a football trip. It was meant to be time with my partner in a country we had never visited but had always wanted to experience.
Football simply became the language that helped me understand where I was.
Looking back now, I realise this was not just a holiday. It was the beginning of The World Club.

Context

After years of travelling through music—with Boiler Room, Worldwide FM, the British Council and other projects—I wanted something different.

There were no interviews to arrange. No radio broadcast. No production schedule. No cultural expedition disguised as a holiday.

We were going to Brazil because we wanted to be there together.

Brazil had occupied a mythical place in my imagination through music: João Donato and Jorge Ben, the evolution of samba and MPB, baile funk, carnival, street sound and the country’s extraordinary queer culture. Music was a large part of the attraction, but there was no particular mission.

At the same time, the FIFA Women’s World Cup was taking place in Australia and New Zealand. We would wake up at difficult hours to watch games and then pass out again afterwards.

I remember being surprised by the apparent lack of visible support on the streets. But the matches were taking place on the other side of the world, often at awkward times in Brazil. The tournament existed inside hotel rooms and apartments rather than spilling visibly onto the streets.

Football was already present in the journey.

I just did not yet understand how present it was.

São Paulo, Brazil, July 2023 — São Paulo, July 2023. The journey began without a research plan; the city supplied one.

Street detail in São Paulo, Brazil — São Paulo, July 2023. The journey began without a research plan; the city supplied one.

The Currency of São Paulo

Before travelling, I had been watching the Brasileirão through Fanatiz.

Every weekend there were aerial television shots of Brazilian stadiums at sunset: enormous concrete structures, floodlights switching on, the city stretching endlessly into the distance.

I remember looking at one of those images and saying to my partner:

“I want to go to Brazil.”

Football was not the reason for the trip, but it was somewhere inside the initial impulse.

Soon after arriving in São Paulo, I went out on a morning mission for coffee.

One of the first things I saw was a large piece of Ronaldo graffiti.

R9 was not being presented as sporting nostalgia or advertising. He was simply there, embedded in the city’s visual language.

It became rapidly clear that football was a form of currency in São Paulo.

It lived on walls, in shops, in conversations and in the way people described themselves.

But my first proper encounter with that culture came somewhere I did not yet have the context to fully understand.

São Paulo street scene during the Brazil journey — Football appeared as part of the city’s visual language rather than as a separate attraction.

The Football Museum

Very early in the trip, before Morumbi, we visited the football museum in São Paulo.

The museum sits inside an old stadium, which made the entire experience feel less like entering a conventional institution and more like entering football’s physical memory.

Outside, a beach soccer tournament was taking place.

That contrast stayed with me: the formal history of Brazilian football being preserved inside, while another version of the game was alive outside—informal, social and happening in real time.

Inside, there was an overwhelming amount to absorb.

History.Sound.Players.Clubs.World Cups.Stadiums.Supporters.Objects.

At the time, I did not yet have a framework for what I was looking at. I enjoyed it, but I was overwhelmed by the scale of the story.

In hindsight, I should have taken more photographs.

I should have spent longer looking through the shop.

I should have bought more shirts.

I should have searched for stickers and smaller objects that might have helped preserve the memory of what we were seeing.

Even the restaurant became part of the coordinate. The burger we ate there was the best burger we had during the entire trip.

That detail sounds incidental, but it is part of how places remain with you. Football culture is rarely experienced in isolation. It is the museum, the building, the tournament outside, the shop, the meal and the journey there.

Because we visited so early, however, the museum arrived before the rest of Brazil had taught me how to understand it.

Later, after Morumbi, Bahia and Rio, I kept thinking:

“I need to go back to that museum.”

I wanted to see it again with everything I had learned.

The first visit had given me the information.

The rest of the journey gave me the context.

Football culture in São Paulo — The museum arrived before I fully understood what I was seeing: history inside, football culture continuing outside.

São Paulo football museum journey detail — The museum arrived before I fully understood what I was seeing: history inside, football culture continuing outside.

Morumbi

I knew I wanted to experience Morumbi.

Buying tickets proved more complicated than expected. The online system required a Brazilian CPF, making it difficult for a visitor to complete the purchase.

So we went to the stadium the day before the match.

The ticket office was not the kind of polished, visitor-facing operation I expected. It was closer to a concrete shack hidden behind a wall.

With almost no Portuguese and plenty of determination, I somehow managed to buy two tickets.

That was it.

The journey had started.

The following day we returned for São Paulo against Santos.

Morumbi was magnificent.

But what struck me was not simply the scale of the stadium or the football on the pitch.

It was the social atmosphere.

Families.Friends.Food.Music.Conversation.

It felt less like people had gathered exclusively to watch a match and more like a party was taking place with football at its centre.

It was basically a party with football on.

On the taxi journey back, the driver told me he supported Palmeiras.

At that point, I had not fully grasped how many football identities existed inside São Paulo.

São PauloPalmeirasCorinthiansSantos

Different histories, communities and ways of belonging occupied the same wider city.

I wanted to see Corinthians too, but there was not enough time.

Already, one stadium had created the desire for another.

Morumbi matchday in São Paulo — Morumbi made the football culture social: stadium, supporters, food, conversation and the journey around it.

Bahia

From São Paulo we travelled to Salvador.

The original plan was to stay long enough to attend a match there, but complications with the Airbnb meant we had to leave for Rio earlier than intended.

Football was not the centre of our time in Bahia, but belonging remained visible everywhere.

We visited the place where Michael Jackson filmed They Don’t Care About Us.

We ate some of the best food of the entire trip—the best food in Brazil, in my memory.

We encountered street music and drumming that transformed public space into performance.

Before leaving, we bought a Bahia shirt and a Vitória shirt.

The man who sold us the Vitória shirt told us they were the proper team, even though they were playing in a lower division.

It was another small lesson.

He was not offering an objective football analysis.

He was telling us where he belonged.

League position was irrelevant.

The shirt carried identity.

Salvador, Bahia, July 2023 — Salvador: street culture, music and local identity. Football remained present through shirts, conversations and claims of belonging.

Street life in Salvador, Bahia — Salvador: street culture, music and local identity. Football remained present through shirts, conversations and claims of belonging.

Bahia during the 2023 Brazil journey — Bahia widened the coordinate beyond the stadium: food, sound, public space and the objects carried away from a place.

Rio

I badly wanted to see Flamengo.

Our flight was already booked, and we only landed in Rio around an hour before kick-off, still carrying our luggage.

By the time we reached the Airbnb, the city was already alive.

It felt as though Rio’s queer scene was having a party around the swimming pool of our apartment block. Music, people and incredible energy surrounded us as soon as we arrived. The market nearby was still open, adding to the sense of movement and hustle.

I managed to find the Flamengo game on television.

Then Flamengo scored.

The whole city exploded.

Noise rose from apartments, streets, cars and buildings.

For a moment, Rio itself became the stadium.

We had missed the match, but we had still experienced its impact.

It felt like a movie.

Flamengo were in a title race, and the result seemed to pass through the entire city at once.

That was when I understood that attending a stadium was only one way of experiencing football.

Sometimes the most powerful evidence of a club’s place in a city can be heard from outside.

Rio de Janeiro, July 2023 — Rio: a city in which the match could be experienced far beyond the stadium.

Learning Rio Through Clubs

I still wanted to visit the Maracanã.

Fluminense were playing there the following weekend, which meant we decided to stay in Rio longer.

I did not know much about Fluminense, so I started researching.

That research opened the city.

FluminenseFlamengoBotafogoVasco da Gama

Their neighbourhoods, social identities, colonial histories and rivalries.

We passed Botafogo’s training ground and visited the nearby shopping centre a few times. Through repetition and proximity, I started to feel strangely Botafogan.

This was not rational support. It was geographical intimacy.

Then I bought a Fluminense shirt without the Betano sponsor. Anna bought one too, possibly a training top. We never saw anyone else wearing the same version.

The shirts became part of the process of entering the coordinate.

Buying tickets brought another confrontation with the local football system. A man on the street became aggressive when I refused to buy his ticket.

Eventually I reached the official ticket office.

I needed identification and had to navigate another unfamiliar process, but I got the tickets.

Another small victory.

Another part of the initiation.

Maracanã

The Maracanã was everything I hoped it would be.

But by then it meant more than visiting a famous stadium.

It was the culmination of a journey through the football identities of Brazil.

We had begun in the football museum without understanding the depth of what we were seeing.

Then came the R9 graffiti.

Morumbi.

The Palmeiras-supporting taxi driver.

The Bahia and Vitória shirts.

Flamengo’s goal shaking Rio.

Botafogo’s training ground.

The research into Vasco and Fluminense.

By the time we entered the Maracanã, the stadium was no longer detached from the city around it.

It had context.

The opponent was Santos—the same visiting club we had watched at Morumbi.

Without planning it, Santos connected the two major stadium experiences of the trip.

The same club appeared in two different cities, revealing two completely different football cultures.

At Morumbi, football felt like a party built around a club.

At the Maracanã, it felt as though the entire history of Brazilian football was somehow present in the structure itself.

It was an incredible experience.

More importantly, it moved something internally.

My coordinates were changing.

Panoramic view inside the Maracanã during Fluminense against Santos, July 2023 — Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro. By this point the stadium was no longer detached from the city around it; it had context.

Matchday at the Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro — Fluminense against Santos. The same visiting club connected the two major stadium experiences of the journey.

The Return That Did Not Happen

For the rest of the trip, I kept thinking about the football museum.

I wanted to return to São Paulo and experience it again.

This time I would take more photographs.

Look more carefully.

Buy the shirts.

Search for stickers.

Spend longer with the objects.

I also kept thinking about a velour Palmeiras jacket I had seen in a shopping mall but decided not to buy.

At the time, it felt like just another piece of clothing.

Later, it became part of the story.

The objects you leave behind can acquire almost as much meaning as the objects you bring home.

In the end, we never returned to São Paulo city.

We spent several days in Ubatuba instead, stepping away from the scale and intensity of the cities. From there, we took a taxi directly to the airport.

While waiting for the flight, I managed to buy a black Brazil training top with a leopard pattern.

It became the final object of the journey.

Not the velour Palmeiras jacket.

Not the museum shirts.

Not the stickers I had failed to look for.

But something found at the last possible moment, while waiting to leave.

The training top became both a souvenir and a reminder of an unfinished journey.

Objects

The physical archive of the trip began almost accidentally.

Acquired

Bahia shirt

Acquired

Vitória shirt

Acquired

Fluminense shirt without Betano sponsorship

Acquired

Anna’s unusual Fluminense top

Acquired

Black Brazil leopard-pattern training shirt

Left behind

Football museum shirts

Left behind

Football stickers

Left behind

Velour Palmeiras jacket

Missing archive

The photographs I should have taken

The missing objects matter too.

They show that collecting is not simply about possession. It is often about recognising significance too late.

That regret would later become part of the World Club method:

Look properly.

Document the details.

Speak to people.

Notice what is being sold.

Understand why an object belongs to a place.

Experience first. Publish later.

But do not assume you will always return.

Belonging

Looking back, Brazil did not simply change the way I watched football.

It changed the way I travelled.

Football became less about results and more about reading cities.

Understanding neighbourhoods.

Starting conversations.

Learning histories.

Finding places I would not otherwise have visited.

Buying objects whose meaning grew after the journey ended.

Regretting the objects I did not buy because I had not yet understood what they represented.

The football museumshowed me the scale of Brazil’s relationship with the game.

Morumbimade that relationship social.

Bahiamade it local.

Riomade it civic.

The Maracanãmade it emotional.

By the time I left, football had stopped being something I simply observed.
It had become a way of understanding where I was.