Football Murals: A Celebration of Soccer's Greatest Street Art: Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Sports Book Awards 2023

By Andy Brassell

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2023 - ILLUSTRATED BOOK OF THE YEAR
WATERSTONES BEST BOOKS OF 2022 – SPORT

'This book is a work of art about football's works of art... Loved it.' - Kevin Day, broadcaster

'A beautiful showcase of such a distinctive part of the game's culture... impossible not to get lost in the book' – Miguel Delaney, The Independent

'Gorgeous to behold... Unmissable' – Danny Kelly, TalkSPORT radio presenter

'I absolutely love this book' – Jules Breach, football presenter

On high-rise buildings, street corners and stadium walls in countries around the world, eye-catching murals pay tribute to footballing greats. From Messi and Ronaldo to Rapinoe and Cruyff, these striking displays are remarkable testaments to the awe and affection fans feel for these football legends and cult heroes.

Join renowned football writer and broadcaster Andy Brassell as he explores this fascinating phenomenon. Offering a fresh, highly visual perspective on the global game, Football Murals is the first book to celebrate these towering works of art.

Beckenbauer and Cruyff, Rooney and Ronaldinho, Totti and Salah, Zlatan and Zidane – being honoured with a mural cements a player's place in a club's heritage and links them to the heart of the community. This richly illustrated book showcases the most impressive examples, explores their inspirational qualities and examines what they say about these icons and their sport.

Written and curated by respected football writer Andy Brassell, this ground-breaking book features more than 100 murals from around the world, capturing the scale, grandeur and wit of this powerful and popular art form. Through a series of short essays and extended captions, Andy shares the players' stories, discusses the cultural politics and explains just why these men and women have been immortalised in mural form.

Covering such diverse topics as Home Town Glory, Football Fame and The Cult of the Coach, Football Murals addresses the issues important to fans worldwide. It spans Marcus Rashford's inspirational mural in a Manchester suburb, the George Best tribute on the East Belfast estate where he was born, the 15-foot depiction of Megan Rapinoe in St Paul, Minnesota, and the Naples 'shrine' to Diego Maradona.

'I can't tell you how nice it is for players to see their face on a mural.' – Jermaine Jenas, The One Show

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781399402798

Andy Brassell

Andy Brassell is a highly respected freelance football writer (the Guardian, the Mirror, Blizzard) and a familiar voice on TalkSport, BBC Radio's Monday Night Club, the Football Ramble podcast and the Totally Football Show. @andybrassell

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

IT USED TO be so easy to show our love. Go to the game and sing your heart out. It was as simple as that. That flew out of the window a while ago. For native Premier League followers, much of it is simple economics. In my school days, winning arguments about football in the playground or the classroom was easy. Did you go to the game? If not, your opinion didn’t count and the discussion was over.

It’s different now in England. Going to the game is simply too expensive (not just at the top level, incidentally – in 2007 I spent less on a season ticket for my then-local team, French champions Olympique Lyonnais, than I had for the equivalent at seventh-tier AFC Wimbledon the previous year), so a generation of fans have grown up not doing it. For a lot of working people, it is simply not affordable on a regular basis.

Yet ways of supporting have also changed, because of the game’s globalisation. To supporters disenfranchised from the stadiums we can add the disinclined. You can watch pretty much every game of your top-flight team’s season without ever leaving the house, if you so desire – legally or in some cases not quite legally, depending on the power of your internet connection.

You may be an Arsenal fan in Mumbai or a Barcelona supporter in Palo Alto, and the lack of geographical proximity means you have to find other ways to connect. While social media interaction – often of a quite insistent nature – is the most direct and easy way to nail your colours to the mast, there are other ways for us to reach across borders, cultures and time differences. Naturally, clubs still aim to monetise that, with today’s club-branded cryptocurrency and NFTs the equivalent of yesterday’s credit cards carrying our club’s crest or premium-rate phone lines drip-feeding news and information at a painfully slow rate as the bill mounted up...

That’s where murals come in. They can speak for us when we’re still looking for the words to express that unconditional commitment and that shared understanding we have for our teams and their history, including the iconic figures (not always the best players, though there’s space for them too) that have represented them and, by extension, us. There’s no language, no loss of tone or nuance, no misunderstanding – like when we get our wires crossed and our hackles raised online – just admiration, aesthetic, passion and devotion.

Renaissance masterpiece meets renaissance master. Pelé changed the game and embraced the world with his virtuoso displays for Brazil.

Cristiano Ronaldo is in familiar pre-match pose here, the picture of self-assurance and total immersion in the forthcoming task at Allianz Stadium, Turin.

Because wherever we support our teams from, we’re all in search of the real, the authentic, something that connects perfectly with our love of our clubs or favourite. It should be a visual namaste; a recognition of the divine.

So when walking down Naples’ Taverna del Ferro, one line back from the water, the locals see Jorit’s 2017 depiction of Diego Maradona, and it’s more than an image of the demigod who brought Napoli their most unforgettable years. With the grey hues in his beard and the widescreen gaze in his eyes, he surveys the kingdom that will always be his and, with a more senior sheen than the unreconstructed street genius who swept all before him in the 1980s, El Diego recognises the public who grew with him, screamed with joy with him, and cried and suffered with him when he left. It is there in his eyes without the need for a single written word.

The image of Ian Wright, in the neighbourhood where he grew up in Brockley, south-east London, is the same. It’s not Arsenal’s Wrighty that is daubed on the edge of a building plot, but his 50-something version with hat and glasses, a man who took his talent to the world, but never forgot the place that made him. Everything he did – shining for Crystal Palace, breaking Cliff Bastin’s Arsenal goalscoring record, wearing the white of England – was built on the foundation of playing in the streets and the parks. As with Maradona, it’s in the eyes. He remembers it all.

For me, the one that hit the spot was more recent. About five years ago I walked into Golazio, the Italian football-themed bar on south London's Camberwell Road, not far from where I lived at the time (it is no longer there, but, happily, has been resurrected in Leeds as Goalccio). It was an oasis of sorts, not least because of the contrast with its surroundings. Walking off the busy drag channelling endless buses on their way to the Elephant and Castle, you found yourself in a treasure trove of Serie A memorabilia. There was a signed Francesco Totti shirt. Images of (the real) Ronaldo. That Sampdoria shirt.

And then, on the wall, an image of young Paul Gascoigne, replete in Lazio kit. Gazza is an iconic player, for my generation anyway. For Newcastle, for Spurs, for Italia ’90, for the plastic moobs and beer gut he wore on the open-top bus on arrival back home at Luton airport in that glorious summer, and for so much more. Yet he was in his pomp, wearing the sky blue Umbro as a badge of honour, reminding us that he had been one of the most expensive players in the world and that his prime will always fly high above the difficulties he has encountered since. That smile, the adoration he drew out of us, is why the bar was there in the first place. Without Gazza there would have been no Football Italia on Channel Four on Sunday afternoons, a splash of culture and fantasy and – let’s be clear – free-to-air football at a time when we needed it most, as pay TV stormed into our supporting lives. Without knowing or planning it, Gazza opened up our worlds, bringing Rome, Milan, Genoa, Florence and Naples onto the TV screens on our estates.

Football murals and street art do it all. They are the most beautiful side of supporter culture, displaying talent, taste and respect for history and heritage. Naturally, this is hijacked by corporate football here and there, with big companies appropriating the culture, but that’s same as it ever was, just in a different, more modern medium. Nike, Adidas and the rest are always yearning for an authentic voice to reach potential customers – and murals do it perfectly. They are of the streets, in the streets, evocative and immediate. That’s not to say that the sponsored art can’t be valuable or beautiful – and with imitation being the sincerest compliment, it frequently is.

When Kylian Mbappé looms over his home district of Bondy, in north-eastern Paris, from the side of a tower block, it may come with the sort of aspirational caption next to the branding you would expect from a global sports manufacturer (Aime ton rêve et il t’aimera en retour – love your dream and it will love you back – is the strapline), but there’s no suggestion that this tribute has not been earned.

It was unveiled for Mbappé’s 21st birthday, by which time he had long since put Bondy on the map. There is an element of convenience, of course, just as there always was in his relationship with Paris Saint-Germain – he fitted perfectly as the hometown hero, yet he had a bigger vision and rarely played into the cliché himself – but it belongs where it is in the same way that the image of Zinedine Zidane, Mbappé’s predecessor as France’s number ten, does on the walls of Castellane in Marseille, overlooking the Mediterranean.

Some will say that in the Instagram age football is too concerned with aesthetics. In reality it always was and we always were. Whether in our front rooms, the bar or the stands of the stadium, we strive to present our boldest selves, fervently hoping for the best, even when secretly fearing the worst, and football supporters still have a great line in self-deprecation, like the Magdeburg fans who carried large, luminous cardboard arrows pointing the team towards goal in early 2012 after they had gone five games without scoring (it sort of worked – Magdeburg did manage to score though they still lost 2–1 to Berliner AK). Yet, representing our communities, sharing the stories, the history, the legends, sometimes with a few embellishments, is what we do and what binds us, and the art reveals our love.

Jürgen Klopp is football coaching’s serial monogamist. After deep and lasting love affairs with Mainz and Borussia Dortmund, he connected with Liverpool almost instantly. This mural was painted by French artist Akse at the heart of the city, on the Baltic Triangle’s Jordan Street.

In Avellaneda, Buenos Aires Province, Diego Maradona is part of the fabric everyday life, as he has been throughout all of Argentina for much of the past 40 years.

1

HOMETOWN GLORY

THE CHANT THAT spilled down from the Shelf at the old White Hart Lane, and now cavalcades down the steep stand of the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, has spread everywhere. ‘Harry Kay-ayne, he’s one of our own.’ It has been so widely copy-pasted among English fans, not just because many catchy terrace anthems are, but because this one contains a sentiment that we all feel. When a player from your club's academy succeeds, it means everything. If your club is the extension of your personality and your soul into the public arena, then your homegrown superstar is you in your Sunday best, at your most likeable and charming, reflecting your parents’ highest hopes for you and, as a supporter, showing your faith off to the world in its clearest, most flattering form.

Arguably the purest manifestation of the homegrown, though, is a player who represents his roots not just by graduating the academy and pulling on the jersey, but by taking the spirit of home with him or her wherever he or she goes. The direction in which the game has meandered means that Francesco Totti is even more likely to be the exception than the rule in the future. Lorenzo Insigne must have dreamed of being to his hometown team, Napoli, what Totti had been to Roma. However, the prospect of his long service, leadership and achievements being rewarded with a pay cut at the age of 30 from club president Aurelio De Laurentiis changed all that. In 2022 Insigne (rightly) chose the security of his family, and avoided having to face the footballing love of his life in direct competition, by signing a lucrative five-year deal with Toronto FC.

Carlos Tevez never looked likely to tread the Totti path – at least partly an accident of circumstance since football’s modern economy means South America’s best are moved on to Europe with often indecent haste – but he has left the imprint of his personality and his roots wherever he’s been. We have never been in any doubt where he’s from: Ejército de los Andes, the overcrowded high-rise estate on the route to Buenos Aires airport – or Fuerte Apache, as it is more commonly known, and as Tevez reminds us each time he takes off his shirt.

The way that he projects, so engagingly, his commitment and his urgency, as if every match is the struggle it took to get there in microcosm, is the impression that always lingers with Tevez. That, more than his astonishing talent, is what makes him never less than box office. He was the magnet that drew us into 2018’s Boca Juniors Confidential series, which was followed by a docudrama just on him, Apache: The Life of Carlos Tevez, in the following year.

Few players are as closely associated with their origins as Carlos Tevez, who has made a point of representing Fuerte Apache, the neighbourhood in which he grew up (and where this mural stands) wherever he goes in the world.

Captured here on matchday at Windsor Park in 2013 is this mural of George Best, possibly the greatest British footballer of them all. It was retained even after the extensive refurbishment of Northern Ireland’s national stadium, symbolising his immortality for the country’s football community.

Though he came from nothing, he is different to Diego Maradona and not just because of the latter’s unique talent. Carlitos is the demi-god you can see, feel, touch, and probably enjoy beer and asado with. In …Confidential, we are first introduced to Tevez on the way to a café to meet with his childhood pals, building on his reputation as a homebody (albeit one who has played in four different countries and two new continents since leaving Boca for the first time). The narrator’s voiceover describes him as El jugador del pueblo – the player of the people – and that is exactly what Tevez has always looked like, perhaps more than any other elite-level star of his day.

He was a remarkable footballer and personality. Money was a huge part of his story and determined a series of unlikely steps on his path out of BA. His relationship with agent Kia Joorabchian’s Media Sports Investment fund took him from Boca the first time into a surprising transfer to Corinthians; to Brazil rather than directly to Europe. It later saw an even more unexpected move to West Ham – the source of much consternation in the English game, which, before his dual transfer with Javier Mascherano, had never dealt with such a brazen example of third-party ownership, something that forced the Premier League to rethink its rule book. Later still he left Manchester United for their upwardly mobile neighbours and rivals City.

Tevez treated it all like it was no big thing, and it probably wasn’t