A decade. Eighteen countries. One enduring idea: football, in its purest form, begins long before anyone is watching. Brazilian photographer Sam Robles has spent nearly ten years documenting the version of the sport that rarely reaches broadcast television: children playing in alleyways, on dirt fields, between two rocks standing in for goalposts. The result is Football Roots, Assouline’s latest title, a work that exists simultaneously as a sports chronicle and a cultural study of freedom, imagination, and belonging.
“When you play on the street, you can do whatever.
You can make mistakes. It’s not all about scoring.”
Like many meaningful projects, it began unexpectedly. Robles was in Nepal supporting a nonprofit aiding earthquake victims when he brought along his camera and found himself drawn to children playing football in the streets. “It was like, wow, this is why I love photography,” he recalls. “Something that I hadn’t felt in a while.” That moment ultimately became the foundation for everything that followed.
In each country, Robles earned trust slowly, community by community, block by block. In Istanbul, after being warned not to enter a particular neighborhood, he arrived anyway and did what he has learned to do best: he handed strangers his phone and let them scroll through his photographs. Three hours later, he was still there shooting. Trust, he discovered, has its own universal language. Football helps.
One of the book’s most powerful threads follows celebrated Brazilian players, including Antony, Endrick, and Adriano, returning to the neighborhoods where they first learned to play. With Antony, the experience became emotional almost immediately. At the first question, he began to tear up. As the conversation unfolded, he removed his watch, then his jacket, slowly shedding the layers of the global athlete and returning, moment by moment, to the boy he once was. It is one of the project’s most striking revelations: what happens when someone is placed back at the beginning of their story.
For Robles, the project ultimately became far more personal than he initially understood. Growing up in Brazil, football shaped much of his childhood, yet there are no photographs documenting those years. Only later, deep into the making of the book, did he realize what he had truly been searching for: a way to recover what had gone undocumented. Every child he photographed across eighteen countries became, in some sense, a reflection of his younger self. His hope now is that one day, those same children will open the pages of Football Roots, recognize themselves within them, and remember exactly what it felt like to play.