A Designed Game
Football: Designing the Beautiful Game will run at London’s Design Museum from 8 April to 29 August 2022 (image: Design Museum).
“Football is the great global game, endlessly discussed and debated but never yet scrutinised extensively through the lens of design,” said the Design Museum’s director Tim Marlow when announcing Football: Designing the Beautiful Game, the headline show for the museum’s 2022 exhibition programme.
Well, at the risk of blowing our own vuvuzela, Disegno would like to direct Marlow’s attention to ‘That Good Sound’, Natalie Kane’s essay from Disegno #27, which examined the sound design of live football during lockdown. Disegno was a fan before it was cool.
More generally, however, Marlow is correct: for a field that blends material science, infrastructure, performance, pop culture and hyper-charged commerce, football has gone largely under the radar of design analysis.
“Football is the great global game, endlessly discussed and debated but never yet scrutinised extensively through the lens of design.”
Football: Designing the Beautiful Game, then, is welcome. Due to open on 8 April 2022, and executed in conjunction with the National Football Museum in Manchester, the exhibition is billed as “unpicking how design has pushed the game to its technical and emotional limits while exploring the incredible cultural plurality at its heart.”
It’s an interesting prospect: a critically worthwhile topic, which is also likely to carry the kind of mainstream appeal the museum needs to drive visitor numbers: in 2019, the museum’s annual report noted that falling visitor numbers had contributed to a financial situation that was “not sustainable in the medium term”. A touch of football’s populism may be no bad thing: when numbers are down, stick the game on.
“So this exhibition is an exciting and important one for the museum but also, I hope, for the game itself,” wrote Marlow. “Equally important is the chance to engage with new audiences, to reach out to people who have never felt that museums were for them.”
The exhibition will clearly benefit from the interest driven by the upcoming Qatar 2022 World Cup and, as the museum notes, there are strong design stories to be told ranging from “the master-planning of the world’s most significant football stadiums to the innovative materials used in today’s boots”.
If Disegno has one hope, it’s that the show doesn’t descend into hagiography: boots and stadiums are all well and good, but if the exhibition is to succeed it needs to examine the sleaze, discrimination and corruption that have also come to characterise contemporary football. Qatar 2022 is a competition mired in scandal, while its governing body FIFA recently received $201m in forfeited funds seized after a global corruption probe into, erm, FIFA. Next to these kinds of systemic issues, boot design suddenly doesn’t seem so interesting.
Designing the Beautiful Game ought to be alert to these issues (and it is highly encouraging that the museum has promised that the exhibition will examine “the grassroots initiatives pushing back against the sport’s commercialisation”): as well as examining football’s beauty, let’s hope the Design Museum takes a look as its seamy little underbelly too.
Story source: Design Museum