Before the stadiums, the floodlights, and the roaring crowds, there was a street, a ball, and a child with a dream. Football is not born in glory. It is born in dust and freedom, in impromptu games played without shoes or goalposts, in neighborhoods where the game is the great equalizer, belonging equally to everyone and to no one.

For Football Roots: The Spirit of the Game, photographer Sam Robles spent a decade traversing eighteen countries, from Brazil and Ghana to Morocco, Nepal, and beyond, to document the rawest expression of the sport. Gaining the trust of children in hidden and sometimes dangerous communities, often without speaking their language, Robles let football do the talking. The result is a body of work of rare tenderness and universality, capturing the joy, grit, and pure love of the game at its most elemental.

With a foreword by Brazilian football legend Marta Vieira da Silva and contributions from Antony, Endrick, and Adriano Imperador, the volume reminds us that greatness is shaped long before it ever reaches a professional pitch. For lovers of sport, photography, and the enduring spirit of childhood, this is a deeply moving testament to the game's most essential truth. 

About The Author

Sam Robles grew up in São Paulo, where the streets were loud and football was constant. Playing the game himself, he learned early how a body moves through space—how a player shifts weight, and how a moment opens and closes. Long before he picked up a camera, he understood the rhythm of the game from the inside. For more than twenty years, that instinct has shaped the way he sees the world. Whether working on large-scale productions or photographing solo around the world, Sam’s approach remains the same: Find the light, strip away the noise, and wait for the real moment—whether his subject is a professional athlete, a model, or a stranger met along the way. For the last decade, he has followed a mission around the globe: to photograph football at its roots. From improvised dirt fields to crowded alleys, he seeks out the open ground where the game is still played for the pure love of it. Sam Robles’s work can be found at www.samrobles.com

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