There are plenty of football shoots that look like football only in the loosest possible sense.
The shirt is there, the ball might be there, the model is usually there, staring moodily into the middle distance from a concrete underpass, a sun-bleached rooftop or some tastefully distressed corner of a European capital. It can look good, of course. Often it does. But it rarely looks like how most people actually experience the game.
For the latest chapter in the Lovers FC and Rizla partnership, Neal Heard, the former’s co-founder, wanted to move in the opposite direction.
The premise is simple: a World Cup watch party at a mate’s house. Think friends on sofas, shirts on backs – the familiar theatre of a big game played out in a living room somewhere in south London.
“To be honest, we’re a little bit jaded by the proliferation of shoots with moody models in exotic locations,” said Heard.
“We wanted to reflect more of the lived experience of the general fan. Who hasn’t got together with pals for a big-game watch party? And we don’t all live in gated mansions. This is the people’s game and we wanted to celebrate that beauty in the authentic.”
Lovers FC has always understood football culture as something broader than the 90 minutes and Rizla, meanwhile, brings its own visual language – instantly recognisable, a little cheeky, and rooted in a long history of countercultural association.
Together, the two brands make sense not because the connection has been forced, but because it feels like it was already sitting there waiting to happen.
“We’re lucky enough to have a lot of requests from a lot of people and, although our accountant often moans, we turn a lot of them away,” laughs Heard. “If something doesn’t feel authentic, then we don’t want to do it. Rizla just feels like a natural fit.”
Heard describes the collaboration as one of the football shirts Lovers FC always wanted to see but wasn’t being given. That has been the point of the project since its beginning in 2016: to create football objects that sit somewhere between memory and imagination, between terrace culture and contemporary streetwear.
The shoot follows a group of real friends spending the day together, watching football and making their own small occasion of it. In doing so, it pushes back gently against the idea that football’s most meaningful moments have to be grand or cinematic.
Often, they are domestic. A crowded front room. Someone arriving late. Someone talking over the punditry. The small rituals that make the game feel shared.
“You have to remember, we are Lovers FC,” he says. “Though raised on the Eighties terraces, where football was often seen as a division, we knew it had an equal power to connect us. Football is a global language understood without words around the globe. This is what we celebrate.”
It is a timely sentiment. Football is frequently discussed through its fractures: tribalism, politics, ownership, rivalry, online noise. Lovers FC and Rizla have chosen to look at something quieter and more durable.
The way the game still gets people into the same room. The way it still creates memories between friends. The way a shirt can mean allegiance, nostalgia, humour and taste all at once.
“In this day and age of isolation and scrolling, the power of football to get people together in one space is a powerful thing,” continued Heard. “And the shoot celebrates this.”
As a second chapter in the partnership, the collection also suggests a creative relationship with room to keep developing. Lovers FC and Rizla both operate with a certain outsider sensibility: familiar enough to be widely understood, but never overly polished.
Heard sees that as the reason the collaboration has landed. “Lovers and Rizla both operate in the margins, in the area of youth identity, on the edge,” he says. “So the two brands coming together in a mutual space means it’s quite open to developing a shared storytelling.
“All we want to do each release is be ourselves, be real and speak to people in their voice, and hope and trust they dig it. They have so far. Long may it continue.”
For all the noise around football fashion, this collection works because it doesn’t desperately elevate the game beyond recognition, but instead finds the charm where football culture often actually lives: in the house, among friends, with a shirt on, a match on and the outside world briefly held at a distance.
The full Lovers FC x Rizla collection lands on May 8 here
