Exhibition: Football: Designing the Beautiful Game

Whether you are a fanatical supporter, part-time punter or sporting sceptic, visitors to this exhibition will enjoy discovering the remarkable design stories behind the world's beautiful game.

Football: Designing the Beautiful Game is the first major exhibition that explores the story behind football, unpicking how design has been used to push the game to new limits.

Take a journey through more than 500 objects, films and interviews in sporting performance, kit development, stadium design and more and immerse yourself in iconic football moments with star objects telling the stories of club legacies and game legends such as Messi, Pelé, George Best and Diego Maradona and more.

Football is unquestionably the world’s most popular sport, with a dedicated fan base and truly international reach. It is estimated that more than half the population of the planet - around 3.5 billion people - watched part of the FIFA World Cup in 2018.

This exhibition reveals the master-planning of the world’s most significant football stadiums, the design innovation used in today’s boots, how the graphic design of team badges, kits and posters shape a club's identity and how grassroots initiatives are pushing back against the sport’s commercialisation.

You will glimpse a rare insight into the people and processes that have made football what it is today.

The exhibition was produced in partnership with the National Football Museum in Manchester.