GOAL | Photo Series Celebrates Goalposts Around the World

July 15, 2026

Our love of football begins, first and foremost, with playing the game. In the back garden. On the street outside your house. In the school playground. On local pitches. For those of us who have played, football will always feel different. Those places stay with you long after your knees give up on you.

After a ball – and maybe a few mates – a goal is one of the most important parts of football. And they come in every shape and size.

When you stumble across a goal on a walk, on holiday or during your travels, you instinctively know that something has happened there. Lifelong friendships have been made. Rivalries have begun. Wonder goals scored. Tap-ins bundled home. Endless arguments over whether it crossed the line, or whether it was post and in, or was just over – even though there’s no crossbar. “Next goal wins.” Bar and in. Top bins. Curling one inside the post. Sticking it in the back of the net – even if there isn’t one. We could go on all day.

GOAL is a photo series by Australian documentary photographer Jeremy Skirrow. Now based in Medellín, Colombia, and a former player and referee himself, Skirrow set out to photograph football through the spaces it inhabits rather than the stadiums that define its professional game.

Shot over the past few years in places including San Pedro de Atacama in Chile, Uyuni and Tupiza in Bolivia, Guatapé in Colombia, Mérida in Mexico, and Aït Benhaddou and Merzouga in Morocco, the series captures one of football’s most universal symbol. Two posts of wood or metal. Lines painted onto concrete. Shapes scratched into dust. However they’re built, they all mean the same thing.

Words and full gallery from Jeremy below, enjoy.

“Across deserts and coastlines, mountains and city outskirts, the same structure keeps appearing. Two posts of wood or metal. Lines painted onto concrete. Shapes drawn into dust. Some improvised, some weathered, some barely holding their shape. Wherever people gather to play, they raise a goal from whatever the ground gives them.

What draws me to the goalpost is everything it carries. It belongs to every age, gender, religion, language and income, standing in places of abundance and places of scarcity while holding the same meaning: a space where people meet, move, imagine and play, claimed by anyone who steps toward it, built from a common instinct we are all born with.

This project looks at the game and at the moments around it. Dust rising from a missed shot. A ball drifting into a neighbour’s yard. Laughter carrying down a narrow street. A child calling their own commentary in the shirt of an idol they will only see on a screen. Teams settled in a minute without a word of argument. The structure stays the same, and its meaning shifts with every person who enters it.

GOAL approaches the goalpost as a shared language, a point where differences soften and the simplest act of play links people who may never exchange a word. The form is modest, and it holds a collective spirit even when nobody is there.

This is what makes football the world game. The same goal stands at the end of a street in Lima and on a pitch in Manchester, and the millions playing toward it share one game across every border on earth. They make the ground their own, and around these posts strangers, neighbours and friends build something real between them.”