“The game’s gone.”

Maybe it has. State-owned clubs. Gambling sponsorships. VAR. The Super League. Social media punditry on results shared across every device before the sweat has time to dry.

Pelé called football o jogo bonito: the beautiful game, played in the half-space between chaos and control. The place where players cut through heavy rain and smoke on a muddy, uneven pitch. Where fans pressed up against steel barricades, one voice made up of thousands. And where, opposite the touchline, the press photographers improvised like players, chasing singular moments as they happened, gone in an instant.

Selected from over 30,000 public domain images in the Dutch Nationaal Archief, these photographs recall when football and photography lived in the same corridor of uncertainty. The texture, the grain, the blur, once incidental, now feels essential. What was once routine journalism now feels like portraiture—not just what happened, but what it looked like. A record of what made the game beautiful.

Photographs by:
Marcel Antonisse, Joop van Bilsen, Rob Bogaerts, Rob Croes, Joost Evers, Eric Koch, Ron Kroon, Rob Mieremet, Bart Molendijk, Jack de Nijs, Hans Peters, Harry Pot, W. Punt, Wim van Rossem, Koen Suyk, and Bert Verhoeff