In 2013, two people with day jobs in sports marketing had an idea. Give one person from every country in the world a disposable analogue camera and ask them to document what football means to them. 

Twelve years later the project is active in over 150 countries and the archive it has built is one of the most extraordinary things in football photography. Someone brought this one into the house at the start of the week and it hasn't left the conversation since. The kind of project that makes everything else feel slightly too polished.

Matthew Barrett and Ed Jones founded Goal Click ahead of the 2014 Brazil World Cup as a side project with no budget, no brief beyond the idea itself and no guarantee that anything interesting would come back. 

The first camera went to Pastor Abraham Bangura in Freetown, Sierra Leone, a church pastor and coach of the Single Leg Amputee Sports Association, a football programme founded at the end of a decade-long civil war to help amputees reintegrate into society through the game. The images he sent back were so powerful that Barrett and Jones knew immediately they had something worth building.

What makes Goal Click work is the equality built into the concept. 

Everyone who participates starts with the same tool regardless of where they are or who they are, a disposable analogue camera with 27 frames and no way of knowing what you've captured until the film comes back.

That does something a professional rig with unlimited storage and instant review simply cannot. It removes the distance between the photographer and the subject in a way that feels almost accidental, and the images that result carry that closeness in every frame. 

The archive spans genocide survivors in Rwanda documenting football as a tool for reconstruction, ultras in Serbia caught mid-flare in clouds of red smoke, players in conflict zones for whom the game represents the one hour in a day where ordinary life feels possible and USWNT players turning the camera on ice baths and dressing rooms and the private moments that never make the official record.

The range of it across twelve years and six World Cups is the point. One idea, one tool, a hundred and fifty countries, and the results keep coming back worth seeing.

The project has run alongside every World Cup since 2014 and almost nobody outside photography circles knows it exists. With the biggest tournament in history now underway across three countries, the house thinks that's worth changing.

The cameras are still going out. We'll be watching what comes back.

Shot of the good stuff.