Magnum Football

These images of football throughout the world, which are included in the book Magnum Football, demonstrate a universal and essential Magnum theme. The men who founded the agency in the penthouse restaurant at the Museum of Modern Art in New York – the Hungarian Robert Capa, the Pole ‘Chim’ Seymoure and the Frenchman Cartier-Bresson – were revulsed by the carnage and hatred and sought a better world based on international brotherhood. 

‘People are people the world over’ was the title of the first joint Magnum project, a year-long essay for Ladies’ Home Journal in 1947. Football is one of the great universal experiences. It is played all round the world. For the duration of the game, race and creed and status vanish. Because the people in these images are playing the same game, the differences in their surroundings, though apparent, are rendered irrelevant. These photographs tell a paradoxical truth that was at the heart of Magnum’s foundation: people are people the world over.