Before the 2010 tournament in South Africa, and in anticipation of Brazil four years later, Alistair Berg gathered two decades of looking at football from the stands rather than the pitch. Dreams & Goals, published by Dewi Lewis in 2009, is the result: a survey of the World Cup and of the wider culture that surrounds it, running from 1990 to 2010. Rogan Taylor, an academic and long-standing campaigner for supporters’ interests, provides the introduction, framing the photographs within a period when the game’s global following expanded enormously.
The structure is unusual for a football book. A chapter is given to each World Cup from 1990 to 2006, so that the sequence moves through five tournaments, and an extended section addresses football in Africa. Alongside the stadium crowds are grassroots scenes: pub sides and Sunday league fixtures, children playing barefoot in Brazilian streets and in South African townships. The photographs come from every continent. Berg, who spent more than twenty years as a freelance photographer, worked for Gamma and later IPG before settling in Cape Town in 2004, and football culture has run through his assignments regardless of where they took him.
What distinguishes the collection is its vantage point. This is not a record of matches won and lost but of the people who travel, gather, decorate themselves and wait. Across 288 pages and some 300 colour photographs, the book’s large format gives those gatherings room. The chapter-by-chapter organisation allows the reader to see how supporter culture changed over twenty years, and the African section gives the later material a specific gravity.
For a collector, the book’s interest lies in that double focus: a sustained authorial project, made over many countries and years, that treats the World Cup as a social phenomenon rather than a sporting highlight reel. Taylor’s introduction adds a supporter’s perspective to Berg’s images, and the pairing of the two voices gives the volume a documentary seriousness that outlasts the tournaments it records.
