I used to love football. But, by the 1980s, I was falling out of love. Finally, I experienced a moment of clarity. Standing — because that was what we did then — at Craven Cottage watching my team, Fulham, being beaten 1-0 by Notts County in the cold and the rain, I understood that I was getting zero pleasure from watching this unskilled hoofing. I never looked back. Yet London’s Design Museum is doing precisely that.
Football, it turns out, isn’t naturally a beautiful game — it had to be designed that way. We don’t necessarily think of the design of the sport and, according to curator Eleanor Watson, there has never been a major exhibition about that relationship.
Football: Designing the Beautiful Game brings together hundreds of fragments from earlier eras. Incredible original drawings by Archibald Leitch, the Scottish architect whose first major stadium, Rangers’ Ibrox in Glasgow, was responsible for 25 deaths when a timber stand collapsed in 1902. He designed Sheffield Wednesday’s ground, Hillsborough, too. And Craven Cottage, along with dozens of others.