The football referee’s whistle was first designed by the Acme company in Birmingham in 1884. And, apart from the fact it is louder now to enable it to rise above the roaring brouhaha of the modern game, in scale, size and materials it hasn’t changed at all since then. Not one jot: the ones Acme supplies to today’s officials have remained shaped as they always were. Which makes the referee’s parping mechanism the only thing associated with the game that hasn’t – across the 150 years of its organised history – altered beyond all recognition.
As this comprehensive new exhibition suggests, from boots to playing kit, from stadia to computer games, everything else has undergone a constant style revolution. Which is a bit of a shame. It would be fun watching a modern Premier League team come out in the pinstriped jodhpurs worn by the Harrow Footers team in 1871 that can be seen in one of the many historical pictures on the gallery walls.
Borrowing more than 150 objects from the National Football Museum in Manchester, and blending them with pieces sourced from across the globe, Football: Designing the Beautiful Game tells the story of how design has not only influenced the sport, but how the sport has influenced wider design. Not least the turnstile. The exhibition has one of the originals from Wembley Stadium, installed in 1923 to count the crowd and ensure everyone paid. It is a system first pioneered there in steel and wood which – albeit modernised, upgraded and packed with complex electronics – is still used to filter numbers everywhere from the London Underground to Heathrow airport.
What becomes clear as you head round the exhibition is that design serves multiple functions in the game. There is the practical – making the ball easier to kick, or giving the crowd a decent view from the stands, or making the pitch actually playable. Or ensuring the boots are less galumphing. Two of George Best’s boots – the first pair he ever owned, given to him as a Christmas present in around 1958 – look like workmen’s clod-hoppers, although the design aspect that makes them interesting is the writing on the sides, applied by Best in whitener, recording the names of various teams and the number of goals he scored against them in the boots.
(Oddly, given the rapid growth of women’s football, the exhibition tells us that no one thought to design a boot specifically for the contours of the female foot until 2020; most women players are still obliged to use boys-size footwear.)
Then there is the aesthetic. In football, so much of the game’s style is advanced through the attempt to forge identity. The best way to do that – and to ensure that committed fans buy expensive new kits every season – is to evoke nostalgia: for football fans things were always better in the past. Playing kit, club crests, even the calling cards of hooligan firms; it is clear from the show that trying to communicate a sense of belonging percolates so much of the way football looks.
Not just on a local level, either. One of the museum’s galleries features a striking display of the official posters of all the World Cups. Their job was to project the host – and its values – to the globe. The thrusting, self-confident tone of Russia 2018 looks particularly diminished now. Some, though, remain almost works of art. The one for Brazil in 1950, in which a giant leg and boot stands atop a ball, its sock decorated in the flags of all the competing nations, is a memorable piece of graphic design, beautiful in concept and execution.
Others are less beautiful. Most visitors will have forgotten the one for Brazil 2014 before they have even left the show. Quite what the Qatar 2022 poster will have on it – perhaps a graphic representation of the immigrant workers who died in the construction of the tournament stadia, or a denunciation of LGBT rights û we have yet to see.
From April 8 until August 29; designmuseum.org
