Far reaches of Russian football showcased long before the World Cup circus came to town

Long before the glitz and glamour of the 2018 World Cup, eye-opening photography project Goal Click aimed to give a voice to more rural regions of the world, including the world’s biggest country – Russia – and the results are staggering.

The project, which was launched in 2014, seeks to document the furthest reaches of the globe with the use of a 24-shot analogue disposable camera in order to give a first-person perspective of rarely accessible regions.

It has already covered over 90 countries with additional in-depth projects in certain areas and project-founder Matthew Barrett told Yahoo Sport that they aim to have some form of coverage in every country in the world.

“Goal Click aims to tell powerful untold human stories through football and its impact around the world,” Barrett says. “The similarities and differences between people and countries, with a strong message of football as a force for social good at its heart.”

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Whilst they are now using a variety of different methods, Goal Click’s first interaction with any country is through the use of a disposable camera. The camera acts as a leveller for all photographers and limits the amount of shots each photographer can take, often resulting in well thought out, comprehensive depictions of areas from a first-person perspective.

“A 14-year-old girl in Mumbai has the same tool as a professional photographer in Australia,” Barrett adds.

The lack of any specific brief to photographers allows room for completely different interpretations of how football impacts different societies. Potential contributors simply contact Goal Click with their story and they are sent out a disposable camera with 24 unique opportunities to document their tale.

Goal Click’s first deep-dive project was in Russia. Exhibited in COPA90’s Moscow Clubhouse, the project gave eight different photographers, across a variety of cities, the opportunity to show their own personal take on the real Russia, away from the bright lights of FIFA’s spectacle.

Alongside their own amazing video projects, such as Derby Days and Mission to Moscow, COPA90 has showcased a variety of creative exhibitions throughout the tournament, including Goal Click.

“Goal Click exemplifies our core value on a global scale,’ Soraya Rowley of COPA90 tells Yahoo Sport.

“One of the biggest things that dawned on me whilst researching Russia ahead of the World Cup was the incredible diversity in the country’s population, landscape and culture and Goal Click’s series really encapsulated this for me.”

Sergey Novikov was one of the participants in COPA90’s ‘Russian aesthetics through a football lens’ event. Novikov is a photographer whose extensive work documenting grassroots football across the vast expanses of Russia, culminating in an incredible 155-page photo-documentary titled ‘Grassroots Russia’.

With his three-year-old son Fedya running around in a football-covered t-shirt, Novikov said that his aim was to “promote unseen Russian football with imagery of amateur players’ everyday lives and also to capture urban landscape in transition.”

For Novikov too, it is also about showing the reality of life for many in the provinces.

“I don’t see any interest in amateur football in general from local authorities, so unfortunately many will not notice any long lasting benefits of the World Cup’” Novikov tells Yahoo Sport.

“But by highlighting these issues through my work, I hope to bring more attention to the problems which need addressing at the Grassroots level.”

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Now the World Cup is over, interest in what Russia is all about will start to waiver, with European domestic seasons only a matter of weeks away.

Nonetheless, interest is Goal Click is only just beginning, according to Barrett, with the World Cup simply ensuring the project has garnered yet more interest.

“Fitting, but terrible cliché’: ‘the project is very much like the opening of a Russian doll, where each new project within a country unveils a deeper, more revealing element of society, often in areas that Western journalists simply will not have the access to,” Barrett adds.

“Our aim is to try and get to the smallest doll in as many countries as we can. Russia is a never-ending project, too. We will continue our work long after FIFA has gone.”