I’ll never forget coming across a few children playing football beneath

a water tower on a stretch of road between Lusaka and Choma,

in Zambia. They were playing with a ball stitched together from plastic

bags. I stopped the car, got out, and began to assemble my gear. I set

up my Contax on a tripod on the roof of the car and began to shoot.

None of the kids cast even a glance at me, much less asked me what I

was doing. It was clear that here football was all that mattered. And

that, after all, is the way it is supposed to be.

I’ve always been fascinated by the aesthetics of sports. The first photos I ever took were of a Formula 1 race at the famous Nuremberg Ring track. 

Over the next ten years, I would shoot football pitches in Nigeria,
Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi, and South Africa. And although
the focus always remained on the pitches—hence the title African
Arenas, encompassing everything from sand lots to stadiums