Football City, Art United
Manchester International Festival, 2025
Featuring What do (Women) Footballers Want?
Football City, Art United. is an ambitious group exhibition for MIF25, presenting brand-new artworks created by 11 legendary footballers and 11 contemporary artists. Together, they explore what happens when two worlds known for flair and imagination - both on the pitch and the studio - come together.
Inspired by the boundary-pushing creativity of the trequartista - football’s visionary playmaker - each artist-footballer duo has produced a new work for this unique show. Expect sound installations, play arenas, paintings, drawings, animation, sculpture, film and genre-defying collaborations.
Conceived by World Cup and Champions League winner Juan Mata, curator and Serpentine Galleries Artistic Director Hans Ulrich Obrist, and curator, writer and filmmaker Josh Willdigg, and co-developed with Holly Shuttleworth, the project invites its creative teams to step into one another’s fields and ask: what can art and football learn from each other?
What do women (footballers) want? This is the question at the heart of a new five-channel film by pioneering American artist Suzanne Lacy, developed in collaboration with two icons of the game: Manchester City and Netherlands forward Vivianne Miedema and Angel City Football Club and New Zealand captain Ali Riley. Together, they lead a bold inquiry into how women footballers impact society’s attitudes toward women – and how cultural perceptions and practices shape the way we see players and the sport itself.
In this new work, Lacy turns her lens on football as a space where gender is expressed and society’s attitudes are reflected. Taking a question-driven approach, she filmed conversations with professional players and grassroots women’s teams in Manchester and Los Angeles. The film interrogates the very architecture of the sport: Who is it built for? Who is excluded? And what might it look like if reimagined entirely from the ground up by women?
Rather than offering answers or utopian alternatives, the film creates space for players to collectively reflect on their lived experiences – from workplace dynamics to relationships with fans – and the complicated visibility of women’s football within a male-dominated industry. The work reframes football as a powerful tool for rethinking how gender operates in public life. What do Women (Footballers) Want? has been realised with Manchester filmmaker Mark Thomas, a trusted collaborator Lacy has worked with repeatedly over the past ten years. Others in the film are: ACFC players Alyssa Thompson, Madison Hammond, and Katie Zelem, and Man City Women’s Academy players Aiofe Colbert-Martin and Hannah Stengert.
Curated by Juan Mata, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Josh Willdigg.
Originally commissioned by Manchester International Festival, TO Live and ARTRA. First two images by Michael Pollard and other images by David Levene. Courtesy of Factory International.