Sky Blue and White: World Cup Final Fans from Miami to Times Square

Four weeks, two cities and one colour. Following Argentina's supporters from the Miami fan festival to Times Square for the 2026 World Cup final — drums, flags, a llama on someone's shoulders, and the long walk home after Spain took it 1-0.

I photographed the beginning of this tournament and I photographed the end of it, and the strange thing is that the pictures barely changed. Same jerseys, same drums, same fathers with children on their shoulders. Only the city underneath them changed — from palms and low Miami light in June to the vertical canyon of Times Square in July.

The 2026 World Cup finished on 19 July at MetLife Stadium, a short train ride from midtown Manhattan. Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time, Ferran Torres scoring in the 106th minute. But this story isn't about the ninety-plus minutes inside the stadium. It's about the four weeks and two cities that led up to them, and about a crowd that had already decided to celebrate whatever happened.

Miami, June: the warm-up

The first frames come from the fan festival downtown, the same crowd I wrote about in the faces of the 2026 World Cup. Miami in June is a soft, forgiving light — gold coming off the bay, skyline stacked behind the screens, everyone in short sleeves. Argentina arrived in waves of sky blue. Mexico arrived in sombreros and face paint, a whole wall of green that started singing an hour before kickoff.

One boy rode his father's shoulders all afternoon with a hand-lettered banner and a jester hat, and another slept against his father's chest through an entire second half. Fandom is an inheritance. You get it the way you get a surname.

New York, July: the crowd goes vertical

Manhattan does something to a football crowd that Miami cannot. In Miami the sky is open and the noise escapes upward. In Times Square the noise has nowhere to go — it hits glass and comes straight back down on you, doubled. Add a hundred drums and a few thousand people who have flown a long way, and the effect is closer to a stadium than the stadium is.

I worked the march the way I work any crowd: get in close, stay a long time, treat individuals as portrait subjects rather than atmosphere. A man with his hair dyed in sky blue and white stripes. A woman raising one arm through the red smoke. A plush llama held above the heads, for reasons nobody could explain to me and nobody needed to. An older man in a bucket hat who let me photograph him for a full thirty seconds without changing his expression once, the billboards moving in his glasses.

“In Times Square the noise has nowhere to go. It hits the glass and comes straight back down on you, doubled.”

The objects people bring

Every football crowd is really an exhibition of homemade objects. A bass drum hand-painted with Messi lifting the trophy, ringed with badges from tournaments gone by. A Maradona banner and a Pele banner held up side by side, which is either a truce or an argument depending on who you ask. A Xeneize flag worn as a cape. Somebody's father's shirt, two sizes too big on somebody's son.

These are the details I hunt in a crowd of thousands — the one hat, the one banner, the one object that compresses a nation's whole relationship with the game. The wide frames give you scale. The details give you the truth. It is the same instinct that runs through my carnival work in Barranquilla: find the stillness inside the noise.

After the whistle

Spain won, and the walk back down Seventh Avenue was very quiet. I kept shooting, because the end of a thing is part of the thing, and because a crowd that has just lost tells you more about what it wanted than a crowd that has just won. Flags came down off shoulders and went over shoulders like blankets. The drums went into the backs of cars. Somebody's kid fell asleep anyway.

I have photographed this city many times — its street food, its musicians, its vintage racers out on the sand — and I have never seen it belong so completely to somewhere else for a month. That is the thing about a World Cup on this continent. For four weeks, every city becomes a borrowed home.

These are the frames from both ends of it: Miami in June, New York in July, and the sky blue and white that connected them.