Total Football: celebrating the art of sports photography

Every now and then, something will come across our desk that is captivating in its simplicity. This week, it happened to be photographer and art director Jeff Masamori’s Total Football, a curated archive of the sport’s history printed in collaboration with The Newspaper Club. Sourced from the Dutch Nationaal Archief, the 64-page publication is a visual critique of the modern commercialisation and digital saturation of the game.

Masamori developed the project as a direct reaction to the current state of the sport, seeking to provide an alternative to the endless scrolling and fast-paced media coverage that dominates contemporary football.

“All of the news surrounding [The World Cup], it really got me thinking about the commercialisation and digitalisation of the game,” Masamori said. “Historic clubs being purchased by states to sportswash their images, influencers and pundits’ media command over how players and teams are perceived to the public, and the number of ways the game is being used to sell us things.”

Sifting through more than 30,000 publicly available images, Masamori selected works featuring legendary Dutch players including Johan Cruyff, Frank Rijkaard, Marco van Basten, and Ruud Gullit. However, the publication focuses equally on the wider ecosystem of the sport. The chosen photographs document muddy pitches, training sessions in the woods, clashes between fans and police, and candid moments behind the scenes.

Isolating these images from their original purpose as news coverage for the sports section and reintroducing them as artistic objects in their own right, Masamori highlights the skill and vision involved in black and white sports photography.

Partly, their value comes from the texture, grain, and blur of film stock, the incidental byproducts of printing and fast-paced shooting, now vintage in their aesthetic by time, and therefore rendered essential design elements for a cultural era that’s, ironically enough, more obsessed with the past than ever.

“Being into photography and having some appreciation for having to photograph matches, press conferences, and the like on film without second chances helped illuminate the idea of trying to create a sequence that subverted the inherent objectivity of journalism photography to create a portrait of the game of the past that felt more beautiful,” Masamori said.

Printed by Newspaper Club in their Digital mini format, the tactile execution forces readers to slow down and engage with the compositions. For instance, a central double-page spread focuses on an injured fan on a stretcher in Museumplein following the 1988 European Championship. Masamori selected it for its symmetry and depth, noting that it carries the dramatic weight of a Renaissance painting.

For Newspaper Club, the project highlights how print remains a vital medium for sports design. The company’s chief marketing officer Kaye Symington said, “At a time when football is consumed through an endless stream of clips, replays and updates, there’s real value in stopping to look at a single image. On the printed page, a photograph has the space to breathe.”

The project features images from photographers including Marcel Antonisse, Joop van Bilsen, Rob Bogaerts, Rob Croes, Joost Evers, Eric Koch, Ron Kroon, Rob Mieremet, Bart Molendijk, Jack de Nijs, Hans Peters, Harry Pot, W. Punt, Wim van Rossem, Koen Suyk, and Bert Verhoeff.