What does global football fandom look like? This book shows “passion, madness and despair” around the world

“Watching and playing football makes me feel alive in a way that nothing else does,” Freddie Fraser Forsyth, director of creative studio and publisher Topsafe tells It’s Nice That. It’s safe to say he isn’t alone. The world’s favourite sport has an unquantifiable following; it brings billions of people together and with the recent kick off of the World Cup, even unfazed friends and family have caught the fever. But the gap Freddie’s noticed in much of our cultural coverage of the sport is a spot for the fans – the people that live and breathe the game. As exciting as it is, a lot of football content “is about the players and the clubs,” he says, “but there are millions of untold stories of fans around the world.”

In the run up to the 2026 World Cup, the creative director wanted to turn the focus on to the football obsessed in order to tell the story of why the sport ignites this feeling in us all. How one game is so globally adored from stadiums in South Africa and Argentina to sofas in Italy, Mexico and the UK. The result is TopSafe’s latest photobook Over Land and Sea. A 340-page goldmine of global football fan culture, the project has an accompanying zine World Cup Fever: a publication that archives vintage Adidas jerseys and photographs from World Cups since Italy’s 1990 event.

Designed by studio Asel Tambay and edited by Freddie in collaboration with Saskia Whinney, Over Land and Sea combines images captured over the past year by documentary photographer Will Robson-Scott of football fans all over the world, accompanied by archival images from the 90s that trace the sports cultural history across borders. “The archival images featured in the book are by Zak Waters who shot for a football magazine in the 1990s called Total Football, where he would travel around the UK meeting really obsessed fans in their homes, they are an absolutely amazing time capsule of the UK in a specific period of time,” says Freddie. The World Cup Fever Zine is full of images by photographer Stuart Roy Clarke from Italia 90, USA 94, France 98 and South Korea and Japan World Cup’s. “Those events are really the apex for fans around the world, and I think those photos get across the madness, the passion and the despair only a World Cup can bring about in people.”

These archival projects shape a 90s focused intro to the book: “The 1990s was such an important time in football and its globalisation; it was the height of the Serie A, the launch of the Premiership, the MLS, J-League, the three World Cups in that decade are all iconic, so it felt like a good place to start,” Freddie says. As they lead into Will’s images of contemporary fan culture, we realise that rituals, adornments and traditions that surround the game are at once specific and universal – they hold the same significance no matter the team, the place or the tournament, but their individuality is beautifully influenced by religion, culture, family and the place you call home. Freddie and Saskia hope that in bringing this eclectic vision of football mania to life each image gets across “how different each person and each fanbase is” and the many ways that “identities are shaped by the game all over the world”, ends Freddie.

Over Land And Sea and World Cup Fever by Saskia Whinney and Freddie Fraser Forsyth are available to buy on the Topsafe site.