O JOGO

in brazil, the game happens in any open space that allows a ball to move. football is a language spoken fluently — and the most humble fields become colossal stadiums in the imagination of every player, every fan.
size doesn't matter. the game has no scheduled time. the rules are loose, shoes and uniforms are irrelevant, boundary lines are imaginary, and fouls are settled by consensus. what matters is the dribble. what matters is the goal.
i grew up in a suburb of rio de janeiro where cobblestones made the goalposts and the street made the world. we picked teams by hand, with the seriousness of people deciding things that matter. i was a terrible footballer. but i loved being there. i loved belonging to it.
years later i travelled across brazil photographing these pelada fields that grow from the earth as if they had always existed. as if brazil had planted them before planting anything else.
they were not football fields. they were the place where i learned that to play you only need to want to. that to belong you only need to be there.
and there is a beauty in this that no stadium can buy. the beauty of a game that belongs to those who play it. that owes nothing to anyone.
these fields are made of what is left over. and that is exactly why the game played on them is whole.