MIFA 2018 World Cup - Collaborative project
Imagine the joy of being selected by your nation to represent your country at the World Cup. Now imagine your despair when you purchase the official tournament sticker book and find that you’re not in it! This is a first world problem faced by 254 players that took part in the 2018 World Cup. Starting out as a personal project, I vowed to illustrate every player missing from the official sticker album, only to realise that it was far too big a job to do alone, so I opened the project up to other illustrators who all donated a small amount in order to take part.
The project was ran like an NFL draft, with a live spreadsheet of available players to pick from, which was constantly updated each time a nation announced their World Cup squad. When that happened, we would quickly cross check the squad with the players already featured in the sticker album to work out who was missing, and then add the missing players to a google sheet. Artists were encouraged, via our social media channels to keep an eye on our feeds for new player drops and then artists claimed players to draw on a first come first served basis. It proved massively popular, with artists claiming new players within seconds of the list being published every time a new squad was announced.
The money raised by the artists who took part was donated to charity, as were the sales from the printed book that we produced (only 254 copies were made). In total, we raised over £3000 for “Imagine Independence” who support people with mental health issues. We called the project MIFA (Missing in the Football Album) as a tongue-in-cheek reference to tournament organisers FIFA.
