The football turn in contemporary art: how the game became an artistic language

The article explores the “football turn” in contemporary art, analysing how football has progressively become a legitimate cultural object within the artistic field. Drawing on the model of cultural diamond developed by Wendy Griswold the study examines the intersections between football and contemporary art, focusing on the practices, institutions, and symbolic processes that have enabled their convergence. Through UK-based case studies ranging from the 1953 exhibition Football and the Fine Arts to recent initiatives such as OOF Gallery and Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, the article reconstructs the historical and sociological conditions that have transformed football from a site of mass alienation into a space for artistic dialogue and experimentation. By intersecting art and football, the analysis highlights how these two systems, once considered irreconcilable, overlap in the neoliberal order of images, generating a hybrid cultural ecosystem where symbolic logics are shared, reconfigured, reproduced and contested.