From sport to testimony: football, people, and the stories behind the game
In my work, football is never just sport. It is a global language, a cultural and visual device that allows me to tell the world through its contradictions, tensions, and human stories. In recent years, my work on sport, and especially on football, has tried to build a different space within contemporary illustration. Far from the celebration of trophies, statistics, and conventional sports reporting, I use drawing as a tool to address broader themes: human rights, migration, discrimination, freedom of expression, and cultural identity.
Within the Sport Drawn section of Channeldraw, football appears as a universal language capable of connecting individual stories and global issues. The protagonists are not only famous champions, but also referees, coaches, fans, persecuted athletes, sports journalists, and forgotten figures who, through sport, have lived through political and social conflicts.
When I draw a footballer, a referee, or a coach, the focus is never on performance. It is on the person. One of the aspects that interests me most is the way a sports portrait can become an act of testimony: a way to reconstruct a story and restore dignity to those who are often absent from mainstream narratives. African referees, refugee players, women fighting for their rights, athletes affected by discrimination—each face becomes an autonomous narrative.
In this sense, football becomes a lens through which to observe the contemporary world. Wars, migration, identity tensions, and civic struggles emerge through individual biographies that find in sport a shared ground. The pitch is never separate from society; it reflects its contradictions and conflicts.
A significant part of my work focuses on the African continent. Many of my drawings tell the stories of players, referees, and officials who have had to face political, economic, or bureaucratic obstacles in order to establish themselves internationally. Through these stories, a geography of football emerges that is often ignored by Western media, yet essential to understanding the global evolution of the sport.
Alongside individual stories, I have also worked on major international events, but always from a different perspective: not the competition itself, but the people who pass through it. World Cups, continental tournaments, and international competitions become opportunities to reflect on the relationships between sport, politics, memory, and collective identity.
A significant work in this direction is the project for CNN: From Headbutts to the “Hand of God”: 11 Moments That Shook the World Cup, in which I reinterpreted some of the most iconic and controversial moments in World Cup history as cultural images rather than simple sporting episodes.
This is complemented by another CNN project during the 2018 Russia World Cup, where I illustrated a series of moments and stories from the tournament (Russia 2018 Illustrated). In that project, I tried to convey the visual and symbolic dimension of the tournament, transforming sports reporting into a visual narrative capable of capturing the atmosphere, faces, and tensions of a global event.
Another important work is My Drawing for MIFA 2020. Created during the pandemic, it was a collective project in which artists and illustrators reinterpreted football stickers as an act of solidarity. At that moment, football was not presence but absence: drawing it also meant representing what was missing—the community, the collective body, the shared ritual.
My approach is rooted in the tradition of graphic journalism, but applied to a field that is rarely explored in such depth: sport. My portraits do not aim for photographic realism, but for emotional intensity. Each face is constructed to bring attention back to the person and their story, turning the image into a form of visual journalism.
For this reason, my work on football is not addressed only to sports fans. It speaks to anyone interested in the human stories behind a match, a shirt, a referee, or a goal. In an era in which sports storytelling is often dominated by the market and spectacle, drawing can still restore football to its deeper dimension: a collective narrative made of people, rights, memory, and hope.
