Barley was drawn to the aesthetics of 70s football: the colours, clothing, silhouettes and hair styles. Assembling the right team and sourcing the right models to avoid the dreaded ‘iPhone face’ was essential to the project (regardless, this is Barley’s imaginative world where anything can pass). Of course, there’s sometimes no avoiding the glam of the modern era, or how the eye tricks us into believing something is more contemporary than it is. But Barley does a great job of scouting locations that look faithful to the time period as well as bringing out the sunny warm hues that was so prevalent in home film photos of the era. “Hair stylist Mike Mahoney was a constant throughout the project and we worked together in selecting the models working backwards from the reference points of archive imagery. The locations were a collection of places that I’d scouted over the past 10 years through lived experience; the club house was round the back of my first studio, bits in Margate were connected to past holidays and the football pitch for the final was Mike’s local ground – a place he’d been going since childhood,” says Barley.
Central to the book was the importance of constructing a world that felt optimistic – photographs of the “protagonists” basking in the freedom of sunlight, the gentle winding down from a match, the smell of grass, old pubs and changing rooms. The escapism of football – this feeling that when a game is on or one is on the pitch, nothing outside of the grounds matters – was communicated through Barley’s clever use of black-and-white photography too, breaking away from the sunny visual canon of the book. In those photographs, we see moments of introspection, a frozen moment, a memory. “I think the biggest marker of the project’s success is the people I worked with along the way. Everyone contributed to this project not for financial gain but the belief that this was something that the world needed, artistic expression in its purest sense,” says Barley. “Along with that there were many setbacks and times where it felt everything went wrong, and in retrospect the results of those mishaps were some of the best images of the whole project. Knowing what I do now it is best just to roll with the punches of the creative process and enjoy it as much as you can.”