One Game: Your Space Or Mine puts the spotlight on grassroots football with Goal Click

Your Space Or Mine

One Game: Your Space Or Mine puts the spotlight on grassroots football with Goal Click

National teams, all-time greats, and global stars will steal hearts and headlines this winter as football takes centre stage with the FIFA World Cup – but for us, football’s not just about the moments watched by millions.

The beautiful game unites, inspires, creates communities, changes lives, and celebrates the passion that can exist within all of us. That’s why our latest Your Space Or Mine collaboration, One Game, is in partnership with Goal Click – the global football storytelling organisation – celebrating football’s vital place in local communities across the world.

Through our street poster campaign and exhibition, in London we’ll showcase Fleur Cousens and Anastasia Kuchta from Goal Diggers FC, a team widening opportunities for women and non-binary players; Maria Romanchenko, a player originally from Enakievo in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, but who now lives in London; and Zayan, a player for Bloomsbury Football’s U15s, a London-based charity running teams to reduce the barriers to sport participation and working to provide equality of access to all.

Taking over our sites in the north-west of England, Manchester Laces’ Beth Lane and Charlotte Wilkins share words about the city’s first inclusive women’s and non-binary football club for ages 16-55 in Whalley Range, all united to fight for trans issues in the sport. The Welsh capital of Cardiff will see Iifan Auchep Venkatanathan’s documentation of his time representing Indonesia in the 2019 Homeless World Cup in the city, where 500 players from over 50 countries travelled to Wales to play in the tournament. Two of our London takeovers will also host Football Across Borders, an international collection of quotes from One Game’s teams alongside players from Iran, India, Brazil and more. Connecting the dots further across continents and oceans, we’ve also teamed up with original flyposting experts UNCLE, who are sharing Goal Click stories in New York City, Amsterdam, and Berlin – cities each with their own rich individual footballing cultures.

Photography by and of the teams and their players will occupy our street space in each of their cities with their own stories. Both the realism and beauty shown in each portrait, action shot, or quiet moment demonstrate the truth and purity of football. Captured through film photography, everyday experiences of football’s ability to bring people together are retold by people who know it first-hand.

21.10.22

Words by BUILDHOLLYWOOD

One Game: Goal Diggers FC

Founded in 2014, Goal Click enables people to tell their communities’ stories on their own terms through analogue photography, written word, short films, and exhibitions. In a world where many voices are marginalised and dispossessed, Goal Click gives people the power to speak for themselves, ‘with football as [the] language of choice.’

There’s an intangible essence in sport that creates strong bonds between the people who play together. In the case of football, it’s a resulting unity that has made its way through almost every nation across the globe. Goal Click has touched upon teams in Angola, Denmark, Pakistan, Japan, Sierra Leone, Serbia, Ecuador, and Argentina (just to name a few), where communities have been instigated, developed, and sustained through playing football. From every continent comes countless stories of teams bringing together people with shared passions, marginalised identities, or common interests, who’ve come to build bonded networks of friends and teammates that support and encourage each other through the beautiful game. Great for health in physical and mental terms, football – on a global scale – is a sport that’s synonymous with community building, and a sport that’s for everyone.

Find out more about Goal Click’s ongoing and previous projects by visiting its website here.