The Faces of the 2026 World Cup: Fan Portraits in Miami

A portrait essay from the FIFA World Cup 2026 fan festival in downtown Miami — Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and France in one crowd, a Maradona shirt, a father's old jersey, and a city that speaks every football language at once.

Once every four years the world agrees to care about the same thing at the same time, and in the summer of 2026 that thing arrived on my doorstep. With the World Cup spread across the United States, Mexico and Canada, Miami became one of its living rooms — and the fan festival downtown, with the skyline stacked behind the screens, became the best portrait studio in the city.

I didn't go for the football. I went for the faces. The matches have thousands of accredited lenses pointed at them; the crowd is where the tournament actually lives, and Miami's crowd is unlike anyone else's — a city built by the very diasporas whose flags were flying over it.

Four countries in one crowd

Stand in one spot at the fan fest and the world rotates past you. Argentina arrives in waves of sky blue and white, a kid in a jester hat riding above the crowd with a hand-lettered banner. Mexico brings sombreros, painted cheeks and a wall of green that starts singing an hour before kickoff. A Colombian bucket hat drifts past painted with players and a chiva bus. And on one pair of shoulders, a boy in a vintage France jersey — his father wearing the matching one, from a World Cup played before the boy was born.

That father-and-son pair might be my favourite frames of the whole day. Fandom is an inheritance. Nobody chooses their team any more than they choose their surname, and a tournament like this is where the handover happens — on shoulders, in replica shirts two sizes too big, in songs learned phonetically before they're understood.

The shirt that carries a ghost

At an Argentina match there is always one, and I found him early: a fan holding up a tribute shirt with Maradona's face airbrushed across the black. Half memorial, half talisman. Photographing football culture means photographing memory as much as celebration — the dead number tens, the almost-wons, the promises made to grandfathers. All of it stands in the crowd wearing a jersey.

These are the details I hunt in a crowd of thousands: the one hat, the one banner, the one shirt that compresses a whole nation's relationship with the game into a single object. The wide shots establish the scale; the details tell the truth.

“The match has a thousand cameras on it. The crowd is where the World Cup actually lives.”

Shooting a crowd like a portrait session

Technically, a fan fest is chaos with good light. I worked it the way I work every crowd — get close, stay long, and treat individuals as portrait subjects rather than atmosphere. The approach comes straight out of my event work at Carnaval de Barranquilla: find stillness inside the noise, use the golden evening light coming off the bay, and let the crowd blur into backdrop behind one held expression.

The skyline did the rest. Palms, glass towers, tournament stage — the frames could not have been made anywhere else on earth, and that specificity is what separates a document from a stock photo.

Miami's World Cup

This city has been rehearsing for this tournament its whole life. On any given Sunday, Miami already watches football in ten languages; the World Cup just gave it a stage and a deadline. It joins the body of work I keep building here — the firefighters, the triathletes at dawn — a long portrait of a city that does everything outdoors, loudly, together.

And for a sports photographer, the fan side of the game is commercially underrated territory. Brands spend fortunes on the athletes under stadium lights, but the emotion they're actually buying lives out here, on the painted faces. These are some of the frames from that evening — the flags, the hats, the fathers and sons, and a city wearing every jersey at once.