Champions league nights

Football in the 21st century is much like ancient Greece – a set of city states, jostling for supremacy. The Champions League, the annual tournament for Europe’s leading clubs, has become bigger, richer and often better than the Euros, the quadrennial tournament for whole nations. This is a league played entirely at night, and almost entirely in the autumn and winter; when the days get longer, only the last seven matches remain. In each city, the stadium glows like something else – a museum, a car park, or, in the case of Bayern Munich, a spaceship. It exerts a force field that leaves the streets humming with electricity. The fans, making their way from work, turn into a human river, a stream of scarves and hats and hopes and fears.

This is what we hoped to capture in our photo essay. The photographer was easy to choose: Peter Kindersley, a Londoner who has twice filled this space with ravishing cityscapes, showing London at night (winter 2009) and ghost signs (Jan/Feb 2014). In London, he had been on home turf; here, he wasn’t. Had he ever been to a football match before, I asked? “No,” he said with a wry smile. “I’m more of a cricket fan myself.”