Drawing the Soul of Football

Football is often seen through its protagonists. The players. The goals. The trophies. The moments frozen in time.

But there is another way of looking at the game, through everything that exists around it. The colours in the stands. The scarves above a crowd. The anticipation before kick-off. The city that identifies with its team. The history carried from one generation to the next.

For Italian illustrator Davide Ialongo, better known as Pillol_art, that world is where football becomes particularly interesting. His work moves between football, basketball, tennis and other sports, but the common thread is not the sport itself. It is emotion.

“When I draw, I try to convey what I feel and what I’m seeing through a graphic representation.”

That may be the simplest way to understand his work. He isn't necessarily trying to reproduce reality. Instead, he interprets it, taking a sporting moment and asking what it feels like.

More Than a Portrait

An athlete can be the subject of an illustration, but for Davide, the athlete is rarely the whole story. What he chooses to emphasise depends on the reason behind the image.

A commercial commission might require one approach. A historic sporting moment another. A victory celebration something completely different. And a personal project gives him the freedom to follow an idea wherever it leads.

“If the illustration is just for personal pleasure, I try to capture everything that surrounds the athlete and what they represent for the sport.”

That distinction is important. Because in his work, the athlete can become a symbol rather than simply a person.

Jannik Sinner, for example, interested him not merely because of his success on the tennis court, but because of what that success represents: a historic moment for Italian tennis and the revival of an entire movement.

The achievement becomes the starting point. The meaning behind it becomes the subject.

Reality, With Room for Imagination

There is a certain energy in Pillol_art's illustrations, a sense that the image exists somewhere between an actual sporting moment and the artist's imagination. That is not accidental. His process begins with planning the scene, but the surroundings are allowed to evolve.

“I plan the scene, leaving room for creativity and improvisation in the background and its surroundings.”

That balance between control and spontaneity is central to his work. The subject and the scene remain the protagonists, but everything around them can become part of the storytelling.

“Very often it's a mix of reality and imagination that makes the final drawing emerge.”

It is perhaps why his illustrations feel less like static portraits and more like fragments of a larger story.

The Colours of Belonging

Football has something that many other sports struggle to replicate: an instantly recognisable visual identity. Red and white. Black and yellow. Blue and black. Colours that can tell you where someone comes from before they say a word. For Davide, colour is often the first point of connection.

“The first thing we notice are the colors, so a strong chromatic relationship with the colors and the team you want to represent.”

But the colours are only the beginning. Because behind every colour combination there is a place. Behind every shirt there is a history, and behind every team there are people.

The Heart of the Game

Perhaps the most revealing part of Pillol_art's philosophy comes when the conversation moves away from the players altogether. What is football without the footballer?

His answer is immediate. The fans. But even they are part of something larger.

“The fans are certainly the driving force and heart of this sport, but they also represent a city, a place, a history — all of this is the foundation.”

That changes the way we look at the game. The player might be the most visible figure, but the identity of a club exists beyond the pitch. It lives in the city. In its streets. In its colours. In the memories shared by generations of supporters. The player is an icon. The team, the city and the fans are the foundation.

When Creativity Meets the Football Industry

Davide has worked on projects connected with some of the biggest names in football, including Juventus, Paris Saint-Germain, Borussia Dortmund and Lega Serie A.

Yet working for a major sports institution does not necessarily mean abandoning personal creativity. The difference, he says, is primarily the presence of a brief and specific requirements.

Creative freedom may be narrower than in a personal project, but that does not mean the creative voice disappears. Fortunately, he says, many of the organisations he has worked with have been willing to embrace his ideas. And that relationship between brief and interpretation is perhaps one of the most interesting spaces in contemporary sports design.

Football is becoming increasingly sophisticated in the way it presents itself visually. Clubs have their own design systems, social identities and carefully controlled imagery. For an artist, however, that does not necessarily represent a limitation. Quite the opposite.

“I think they are greater opportunities to enhance one's creativity and bring out one's emotions.”

Finding Your Own Image in a World of Millions

There is another challenge facing artists today: the sheer volume of images being produced. Football alone generates an almost endless stream of photographs, graphics, videos and social media content.

And now AI has made image creation faster and more accessible than ever. For an illustrator, the temptation is obvious: if almost anything can be produced, what makes one image worth looking at?

For Davide, the answer isn't technology. It is authenticity.

“We're certainly so bombarded with millions of pieces of information that we can easily get distracted, especially with AI, where things can be done in much less time and in thousands of ways.”

The response, then, is not necessarily to compete with the speed of the machine. It is to return to the reason the work was created in the first place.

“The important thing is to follow your emotions and your dreams.”

Football, Drawn From the Outside

Perhaps this is what makes Davide's work particularly interesting. He doesn't simply draw football. He draws what football leaves behind.

Emotion. Identity. Colour. Belonging.

A city recognising itself in a team. Thousands of people becoming one crowd. A sporting achievement becoming part of a country's memory. And perhaps that is where the visual language of football is at its most powerful, not when we look at the player, but when we look at everything that exists because of the player.

Football has always been more than what happens between the four lines. For an artist, sometimes the most important part of the game begins outside them.

You can follow Pillol_art's on his socials here