The Beautiful Game

Photographer: Giles Revell

Football has been immortalised in a series of statistical CGI sculptures commissioned by the Financial Times magazine. Created by Happy Finish’s Matt Painter for artist and photographer Giles Revell, football has never been seen quite like this before.

This series was formed from exclusive statistical data recorded during the 2011 Champions league final between Manchester United and Barcelona. Throughout the game every single pass, touch & goal down to the possession of each side was recorded as analytical data used to make decisions about players performance during and after the game.

“While data has for a long time been visually represented through graphs & pie charts it was a new challenge to create a sculptural piece using statistical data. CGI was the perfect tool for creating these images as all the data could be entered and manipulated in a visual form to create this series. As this was quite an open brief with the data being the only asset to start the project, challenges arose in finding the best way to visually represent the multi faceted elements of the game.” Matt explains. “We finally decided the most successful image was the one that represented the tug of war between the two sides with raised areas representing possession, passes, kicks and goals from each team throughout the 90 minute game.”

Take a look at the final image that made cover of the Financial Times magazine plus some of the other images conceptualized this project. The full article can also be seen on the Financial Times website.