A conversation with Zack Goldman of Common Goal
Capturing the creativity of the global game
This is the first in a series of conversations with football creators by Tap In, a dashboard guide to world football’s essential matches.
Zack Goldman is a Co-Founder of Common Goal, a creative agency one player short of a five-a-side that also includes Eric Beard, Nathen McVittie, and Maxi Rodriguez. They’re the crew behind the global photography project Where is Football and co-creators of the Toffee League, a grassroots soccer league in Portland that connects the community through the goal to make football weird.
How did you fall in love with soccer? I think that it happened on more of a sociological level. I was lucky enough to travel a lot when I was younger, my parents are big travelers and they’d frequently take us with them. I began to see soccer as more than just a sport, but something that was a lingua franca — a way that people can communicate in the absence of language. Wherever I went, there seemed to be soccer happening.
It was something from an early age that I really gravitated to. Soccer was this childlike obsession. I was learning about different countries — it got me really interested in atlases — and it helped me see a kind of world I didn’t know existed at the time. International soccer and international travel have always been twinned in my mind.
For me, it’s always been more about exploration and communication than just the sport itself. It’s an interesting and roundabout way of getting into soccer that’s perhaps not as common, but was my path.
It feels like there’s a direct connection between Where Is Football and your origins with soccer. Totally. We established Where Is Football as an endeavor to express the depth and breadth of the world’s love for the world’s game. We wanted to show how it exists in so many different facets of our lives and so many different corners of the globe. That even though we play it differently or we experience it differently — there are all these different styles and flavors — at its root it’s still the same thing. It’s a way in which we can connect with each other. The game contains so much diversity, but at the end of the day you can go anywhere in the world and find a game that you understand and use to relate to people. So for us it was creating that and letting that guide everything that we do.
Where is Football is a pretty big feed that comes from a lot of different places, and my friends Eric Beard, Nathen McVittie, Maxi Rodriguez, we all have similar backgrounds in the sport. All of us love traveling, all of us have lived in different places; and for all of us soccer is how we made friends throughout our lives.
It’s been something that we’ve been lucky enough to be able to put into a vocational realm, an artistic realm, and beyond the field of play. And that’s kind of how we see the sport, as something that is a lifestyle, something that people devote themselves to beyond recreation. For all of us it’s been a natural road out of the idea of travel and exploration, and artistic expression.
That’s an interesting point. You see a lot of hand-wringing over how the sport is changing, how people are “here for everything except to watch matches.” How do you perceive the growth of soccer from beyond the pitch and into every aspect of our lives? It’s been really interesting for me because, it sounds crazy to say, but my life changed dramatically through Twitter. I’ve met so many of my closest friends and experienced so many of the things that I enjoy in such a different way because I’ve had this community to talk to about stuff. It’s really kind of changed my own prism of viewership. I’ve really changed the way in which I consume entertainment and sports. A solid 90% of what I watch now I want to be talking about with people.
And the same thing goes with Where Is Football. We don’t post a lot, but when we see something we really enjoy, there’s this….need to share it with other people. Everything we’ve shared is user generated content, whether our own, or from people who have put it out there with #whereisfootball, or they’ve tagged us in a photo and we’re amplifying their own voice. I think this culture of sharing and delivering experiences that can be amplified so easily is something that is relatively new in the world with the advent of social media, and it’s something that I think has already had a big impact on the way in which I experience and share things related to soccer.
Yeah, I see it not as people aren’t paying attention to matches, but that we’ve taken football and infused it into everything. Fashion, art, technology, music. 100% And I think I’ve learned a lot from Eric, Nathen, and Maxi. We all have different backgrounds in that regard. Eric has done a lot of work with agencies and brands and he also collects a lot of different types of art. Nathen is an amazing photographer and has done stuff in fashion and music. Maxi has done a lot in community management and his editorial focus is key for us. I’ve learned a lot from working with them and Where Is Football in how we experience the game, how we talk about the game, and how many overlaps it has with other aspects of our lives in ways that I had never seen before.
Through having conversations on Twitter and Instagram and seeing something someone has done with a football kit or seeing a new way of shooting a game, it seems like you uncover a new way of seeing the sport and talking about it every day. And that might sound hyperbolic, but I really do think there’s this kaleidoscopic world of football now where it intersects every aspect of our lives in different ways. And that has almost eclipsed my love of the game itself. More than anything, I love everything that happens around the sport and this community that we’ve been able to tap into with social media that really has no borders. It’s entirely global. It’s a really special time to be in love with soccer.
The Toffee League could also be seen as an extension of that. How did you get involved in it? Eric and I lived in Portland for a while and we always hung out in this bar called the Toffee Club, it’s an amazing traditional English football pub in town. We became really close with the owners there and eventually we all came up with this idea of creating a rec league that really stood for something. Eventually, we settled on this idea of making football weird. And really finding a brand of football that spoke to Portland and to this idea of what the city means and how it’s unabashedly unique and different.
We worked really closely with Toffee Club, Avery Dennison, who are this massive materials design company, and Land of Plenty, who did a lot of the creative alongside our strategy. Football has a history of artistic expression that also really spoke to what Portland is, so we came together as a collaborative to express that.
So many of the kits that are worn in World Cups are designed in Portland. The city has Nike, it has Adidas, and it has so many amazing and worthwhile nonprofits that all use sport to connect with different marginalized groups and people who need help. In Portland, there is this confluence of things I really value, in terms of what football can provide. It can be something that’s inspiring to look at. It can be an amazing way of connecting communities. It can be an awesome vehicle for social good. It can also be this thing that gets on people’s radars and inspires them to do something great in their own community, whether that’s in soccer or in some other avenue. It was pretty special to be a part of.
Learn more about Common Goal here and keep up with Where Is Football on Instagram.
