In Medellín’s alleys and side streets, football’s founding spirit shines

Tom Rings­by land­ed in Medel­lín, Colombia’s sec­ond largest city, on July 14, 2024. Step­ping out of the air­port and into a taxi, he began lis­ten­ing to the car radio that the dri­ver had put on, and the pho­tog­ra­ph­er instant­ly realised that it was not a nor­mal day in the city.

“I land­ed dur­ing the Copa Amer­i­ca and got into the cab, and it was the final between Argenti­na and Colom­bia,” he says. ​“Then we’re dri­ving through Medel­lín, which is a crazy city with all these hills and val­leys, and these bars on the side of the road were packed with peo­ple in yel­low shirts cheering.”

Colom­bia would ulti­mate­ly go on to lose the final 1 – 0, thanks to an extra time win­ner from Argen­tine strik­er Lau­taro Martínez. ​“When I went to bed fire­works were going off, and peo­ple were scream­ing and cry­ing,” Rings­by con­tin­ues. ​“Although they unfor­tu­nate­ly lost, it was still amaz­ing, and I was like: ​‘Yeah, this is def­i­nite­ly a cap­i­tal city for foot­ball.’”

Orig­i­nal­ly vis­it­ing town to shoot a music video, it was the city’s omnipresent foot­ball cul­ture that drew his atten­tion the most, and espe­cial­ly, its infor­mal, DIY street foot­ball scene. He was put onto it by his assis­tant, who had walked past a tour­na­ment, and shot a few pho­tographs on his phone to show Ringsby.

“I got real­ly inter­est­ed in it, so I reached out to San­ti­a­go Rodríguez, who was the pres­i­dent of the Colom­bian fac­tion of the Inter­na­tion­al Street Foot­ball Asso­ci­a­tion (ISFA),” he explains. ​“And he is involved in run­ning the Tor­neo del Bar­rio [com­pe­ti­tion] – they stream it on Twitch and they get loads of views, and some of the goals go real­ly viral.”

• Read next: The mosh­ing, masks and mania of Colom­bi­a’s met­al scene

“Foot­ball real­ly seems to be the lifeblood of the city,” Rings­by says. ​“There’s a say­ing there, that you’re nev­er real­ly a strong kick away from anoth­er pitch. And I think it’s actu­al­ly true – by the time you walk past a pitch and dis­ap­pear from view, there’s anoth­er one in front of you. Whether they are state of the art, mod­ern pitch­es or just graf­fi­ti on the pave­ment, some sort of venue for play­ing foot­ball exists.”

As foot­ball con­tin­ues to bal­loon as the world’s most fol­lowed sport and a com­mer­cial prod­uct – it is esti­mat­ed to have 3.5 bil­lion fans – the sport­ing pyramid’s high­est peaks are often dom­i­nat­ed by glitzy spon­sor­ships and cer­e­monies, curat­ed mar­ket­ing, and unfath­omable wages, as much as the sport itself. But cap­tured in Ringsby’s pho­tographs is the sport’s found­ing essence, which sparked its orig­i­nal explo­sion in popularity.

“San­ti­a­go, for exam­ple, doesn’t fol­low main­stream foot­ball any­more,” the pho­tog­ra­ph­er says. ​“Because it feels so cor­po­rate and brand dri­ven com­pared to street foot­ball, which is more punk rock and grass­roots, and more like how foot­ball orig­i­nal­ly start­ed. It was peo­ple who had day jobs rep­re­sent­ing their neigh­bour­hood, play­ing against oth­er towns on the week­end. These are often peo­ple who have grown up togeth­er and live in the same neigh­bour­hood, play­ing oth­er neigh­bour­hoods in Medellín.”

• Read next: Bohemi­an FC is more than a foot­ball club

The series also doc­u­ments a dif­fer­ent side to the city com­pared to the pop­u­lar imag­i­na­tion. In past decades, as the home city of nar­co baron and politi­cian Pablo Esco­bar, it was most often asso­ci­at­ed with the illic­it drug trade, crime and mur­der. But vio­lent crime rates have dras­ti­cal­ly fall­en since Escobar’s hey­day, with 375 homi­cides in 2023, com­pared to near­ly 7,000 in 1991.

“Since the ​’80s and ​’90s it has had a huge change, and become more of a cul­tur­al and artists,” Rings­by says. ​“But for a lot of peo­ple in the city – those we were hang­ing out with were in their 20s – that is his­to­ry to them. There’s a real­ly pos­i­tive out­look on it, and the future feels bright in a lot of young people’s eyes.”

See Street Spir­it and more pho­tog­ra­phy from Tom Rings­by via his offi­cial web­site.

Isaac Muk is Huck’s dig­i­tal edi­tor. Fol­low him on Bluesky.

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