“99% of people around the world are playing football without any money”

“While Fifa sells World Cup Final tickets for $32,970, a different kind of football event is coming to Berlin." That's how the Berlin Indie Football Festival, a first-of-its-kind event in July, frames itself.

The two-day festival, which will take place a week before the World Cup's deciding match, is bringing together a crew of people from the local and international DIY football world — coaches, players, match photographers, sustainable kit designers, Musa Okwonga and Ryan Hunn from Stadio podcast — for a weekend of "zero corporate bullshit" around the sport. After the talks and workshops, they'll mix the lineup of speakers with attendees for an Indie World Cup tournament at Kurt Ritter Sportplatz in Friedrichshain.

"Everyone feels really weird about this World Cup," organiser Andrew Weber told HEIST — perhaps an understatement. "We’re trying to take that back, to focus on the game."

To find out exactly what Berliners can expect from the festival, HEIST spoke with Weber about how he designed the event, why its timing is deliberate, and whether grassroots football could be the future of the sport.

First, what's your background in Berlin football?

I moved here from Australia, and I moved because I was very far away from football in Australia, I felt very isolated. I came to Europe when the World Cup was in South Africa [in 2010], with my little brother and a video camera. We were doing a documentary, just running around in bars around Europe asking people questions — ‘Who are you? Why are you watching? Where are you from?’ That was quite a new idea at the time, actually. There weren’t really vlogs. We were making these videos every three days and just putting them on Vimeo. I was going to go home after that World Cup, but I decided to stay in Berlin. 

What was the inspiration behind the festival? 

A couple years into being here I joined a team, the Unicorns, which were called something else at the time. When their coach needed to go back to Ireland, the team asked me to coach, and then from there I got very interested in every part of running a team. The on-field coaching, but also understanding how everything works; how do we make the community function, how do we take care of everybody, what do we want to stand for, what do we want to look like? I've always done football projects that balance my design and creative side. After 12 years of doing that in Berlin, I was like, okay, I’ve met all these people, and now I want to put something on. It's been nice, because it's a real full-circle thing — I went out into the world to understand and explore, and now I feel like I'm getting like all the people that I collected along the way and putting them in one place.

When you see that that game changes so much because of money or because it's been optimised like every other capitalist thing, you just get disconnected.