This one came up over coffee this morning and we haven't been able to let it go. When Flo Pernet applied for accreditation to cover the FIFA World Cup 2026, the request was rejected. No stadium access. No pitch-side position. None of the things a sports photographer usually needs to do the job. 

Most people would have called it a dead end. Flo called it a different brief.

She started photographing the tournament from home, pointing her camera directly at her television screen. Close-ups of players mid-celebration, decisive moments captured straight off the broadcast, the texture of the screen itself becoming part of the image. No editing trickery, no clever workaround. Just a camera, a TV, and an eye trained well enough to find a frame worth keeping inside someone else's broadcast feed. 

As she put it herself: she didn't have accreditation, but she had her television and her own vision, with full credit given to the broadcast teams and directors whose live coverage made the images possible in the first place.

What makes this worth talking about in here isn't the novelty. Plenty of people could point a camera at a screen. What makes it worth talking about is what it reveals about creativity under constraint. Flo didn't try to recreate what an accredited photographer would have shot. She found an entirely different picture, one that only existed because the obvious route had been closed off. 

The restriction was the thing that produced the idea in the first place.

The response said everything. Michael Olise shared her images. The Portugal national football federation posted them too, with a caption that captured the whole point better than any commentary could: you don't always need to be inside the lines to see the beautiful game differently.

We talk about taste in here more than we talk about access, and this is exactly why. 

The brief you didn't get can sometimes be more interesting than the one you did.

Shot of the good stuff.