0009—THAT SPORT YOU DEEPLY CARE ABOUT KEEPS CHASING ME (EVEN THOUGH I DON'T CARE ONE BIT. SORRY.)
It’s funny. Even though I swore I wouldn’t do any more sports-related illustrations (I’ve been feeling bitter about, well, everything, you see), I have to admit I’m really happy with how this recent job for 11Freunde, a German football publication under the umbrella of Der Spiegel, turned out.
A quick lay of the land first. The brief asked me to create portraits of eight prominent figures who had been voted the best in their respective areas of German football.
All good. But also, in all honesty, I couldn’t care less. Not at first, anyway.
Hear me out, though.
What ended up exciting me about the commission, however, had very little to do with football. It was the fact that Daniel Ludwig, the design director, specifically asked for a style inspired by a series I had created years earlier for the now-defunct ShagMag, a digital magazine created by Julia Rose that seemed to materialize out of nowhere during the pandemic and, thankfully, kept me busy through those months of complete uncertainty.
I can’t remember the original brief for ShagMag, but given my long-standing fixation with card-deck iconography, I’m almost certain I was the one who proposed depicting NFL players as kings and jokers.
My Relationship with Football and Magazines
The ironic part is that I honestly don’t care much about football—or sports in general—even though I’ve somehow built part of my career on that side of the fence...
Okay, fine, it’s actually a little more than not caring much. I actually don’t give two flying fucks about football. At all. I wish I did, but I just don’t. Not a single fiber of my body is even remotely aroused by sports in general. I simply find the whole thing awfully boring, and the obscene amounts of money thrown at it utterly vulgar (FIFA alone is a fucking grotesque institution).
I was having a beer the other day with my friend Federico, a giant football devotee, and he was trying to explain why the sport mattered so much to him (and, for that matter, to the rest of the world). As I listened to him, I realized that nothing quite makes me feel emotionally unavailable like football. And tropical music.
“I guess you feel for football what I feel for cinema,” I ventured.
“I guess,” he replied.
It was around 2011 when Robert Priest first approached me to work on a football magazine aimed at American readers. The brief for this assignment was beautifully simple: Mario Balotelli being chased by his demons.
I actually tried to avoid the assignment, completely oblivious to Robert's reputation in the magazine world of New York City.
“Okay,” I said. “What if he’s holding a baby demon’s head in his arms?”
I was secretly hoping to freak Robert out a little.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” he replied. “Do it.”
Mario Balotelli embracing his demons. Early version.
That one exchange ended up cementing both a working relationship and a friendship with Robert and his business partner, the wonderful Grace Lee.
The Balotelli illustration was never published, although Football Culture in the Netherlands later turned it into a T-shirt. The original magazine Robert had reached out about also took a different turn, but its later incarnation, Eight by Eight, eventually became what I considered my second editorial home after El Malpensante.
What I love about working with Robert and Grace isn’t football itself. It’s the freedom they give me to explore it from completely different angles. They never seem particularly interested in whether I could draw football. Instead, they are interested in whether I could bring my world into football.
To this day, I still think the best thing we’ve ever done together was a set of football boots for Puma sometime around late 2020 / early 2021:
Unfortunately, COVID cast a shadow over the project, and it never received the kind of exposure it probably would have otherwise. But I still love looking at them. One for the ages, for sure.
Anyway, I am incredibly grateful for every client who has allowed me to smuggle my own ideas into the world of sports—whether it’s football, baseball, or basketball—and make those assignments feel like they belong to me as much as they belong to the sport.
When my own demons finally come chasing me, I’m pretty sure they’ll be wearing cleats while holding footballs or something.
And maybe then I’ll finally give myself to them.