PRESENTATION OUTLINE
Marcel Duchamp (centre-back)
“I don’t believe in football. I believe in footballers.”
Franz Kafka (left-back)
“Anyone who watches the beautiful game never grows old.”
Salvador Dalí (central midfielder)
“The attacking midfielder is destructive, but he destroys only what he considers to be shackles limiting his vision.”
Frida Kahlo (centre-forward)
“Wings, what do I need you for when I have feet to play football?”
Albert Camus (goalkeeper)
“Autumn is a second spring when the football season starts.”
André Breton (left winger)
“Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature’s chief masterpiece is the step-over.”
Man Ray (centre-forward)
“All football pundits should be
assassinated.”
Samuel Beckett (right winger)
“Ever tried a bicycle kick. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Max Ernst (right-back)
“Creativity is that marvelous capacity of players to pass and move and draw a spark from their juxtaposition.”
Jean-Paul Sartre (centre-back)
“Only the guy who isn’t running has time to complain to the referee.”
René Magritte (central midfielder)
“The luxury player evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”
During the second world war, many artists fled to Marseille, where André Breton assembled a group of surrealists every Sunday to play creative games. Inspired by this, author Mike McInnes and artist Matt Kenyon imagined the surrealists as a football team, assigning positions and made-up quotes to figures including Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo and Albert Camus (who was actually a goalkeeper in Algeria in the late 1920s). The football cards appear in McInnes’s book Homo Passiens: Man the Footballer (Meyer & Meyer Sport). “Surrealism and football are a very good match,” says McInnes. “There’s a certain type of brainwave among fans when they’re watching games – a kind of dream state. And dream psychology was an important part of surrealism.”
