The world of football is not, you would have thought, a world that concerns itself overly with events in art. These two great spheres of human endeavour appear fiercely separated. And in most locations they are. But not in the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, where, unbelievably, a gallery has inveigled its way into the hall of balls and is now luring unsuspecting football folk on to the aesthetic quicksand of art.
The Oof Gallery is inside the huge Spurs merch shop, secluded in a small Georgian building that the planners, in their infinite English perversity, insisted must remain untouched while the club’s new stadium was built around it. It now lurks there, almost invisible, surrounded by mountains of Spurs paraphernalia, a small pearl in a huge oyster.
The shows they mount here are usually on a football theme of some sort. The latest offering pairs the football photographs of Peter Robinson with the creatively vandalised football shirts of Nicole Chui, who, on this evidence, ought never to have been allowed near a sports kit. More on that and on the adjacent issue of the awful 2025 Tottenham shirt in a moment. First, we need to plunge into the soccer sadness of Robinson, 81, hailed by The New York Times as the “greatest living football photographer”.
Amazingly he has recorded 13 World Cups and nine Olympic Games. For five decades he has been photographing the pigskin sport, and the show confirms he has visited and watched pretty much everywhere it has been played.
In 2003 he was in Japan photographing the space-age Yokohama Stadium and noticing how a field of cabbages had grown plentiful right outside it. In 1993 he was in Beirut, shedding a tear for the Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium after an attack by the Israeli air force had turned it into a bombed-out crater filled with refugees.
What’s fascinating here is how much of Robinson’s interest lies at the game’s peripheries and how little actual football he has recorded. When Portugal played Spain in Porto in 1981, he watched a disembodied hand reach out to collect the tickets from a walled-up bunker masquerading as an entrance kiosk. In the groundsman’s hut at Southend United in 2004, he noticed that the groundsman was watching another game on the telly while his own team were playing outside through the open door.
What really interests him is the humanity of football rather than its skills: the way it bleeds off the pitch into the surrounding life. He likes a joke too. In 1970, at Wolves v Man Utd, he caught a moment when Bobby Charlton was approached by a policeman while taking a corner. Robinson called the photo The Two Bobbies.
His picture of Bill Nicholson entering the gates of White Hart Lane in 1970 with a cheeky smile and a shapeless Marks & Sparks suit has become iconic, because Nicholson looks more like a dusty geography teacher than the most revered of all Tottenham managers.
Humanity done, the rest of the experience at the Oof Gallery and its surroundings feels as if it is emphasising how football has changed for the worse, and how delusion has crept into its world. Nicole Chui is the founder of Baes FC, “a grassroots football community for women, trans and non-binary people of Asian heritage aiming to play football in a safe space”. It sounds like a healthy and jolly London arrangement. Good on her.
Where things start to unravel is that she also imagines herself to be a football artist, and in that role she has been given a space at the Oof to display her wares and to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that she should stick to founding community soccer teams.
Chui’s creative ambition is “to disrupt perfection and inspire others to embrace their raw emotions”. This involves taking a needle and thread to an assortment of football shirts and sewing spider patterns across them, ruining their shape and disfiguring the design ambitions of the shirts’ makers.
If she improved them, even slightly, this would be a noble task. She doesn’t. Instead the gaudy patching feels like an act of aggression, death by a thousand stitches, a killing of the football shirt. Somewhere along the line she has persuaded herself that being messy (as opposed to Messi) is the same thing as being creative. It isn’t.
As it happens, football shirts have experienced something of a renaissance in recent years. My fellow Sunday Times writer Joey D’Urso has just written an entire tome on the subject. Called More Than a Shirt, its big point is that every football kit in every land “tells a deeper story about the world we inhabit”. To gather his evidence, Joey travelled the world, but I guess he never made it to the Tottenham stadium and the merchandising souk that surrounds the Oof Gallery, where rack after rack of 2025 Spurs kit makes you cry with its lack of fizz or ambition.
To see where football shirts really have advanced, you need to leave behind the moneyed casinos of the Premier League and head down to the lower divisions. Walthamstow FC, from the Isthmian League North Division, recently brought out a fabulous turquoise kit based on the famous wallpaper designs of the Walthamstow local William Morris.
My own team, Reading FC, now having fun in League One, issued a kit featuring a purple turtle design inspired by a local nightclub. This year their shirt is based on a Victorian biscuit tin designed by the local cake makers Huntley & Palmers.
This is the football shirt cementing important links with the local community and pushing out the boat in invention and excitement. Sad, robotic Tottenham Hotspur should definitely try it.
Peter Robinson: Double Vision is at the Oof Gallery, London, to Aug 31; Nicole Chui: Ruined, to Aug 2; oofgallery.com