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It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine

MATINAL'S love letter to Spain's legacy of the footbag.

By Where Is Football

December 7^th, 2024

It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine is film made by MATINAL, a Madrid-based Creative Studio & Community focusing on the culture around Post Football. It's a love letter to the legacy of the footbag.

Shot in Madrid, featuring Paloma Freestyle, 3x Spain freestyle football champion and footbag champ and connoiseur, playing with the Matinal Hacky Sack. The following is a conversation with Matinal's co-founder, fashion & sports photographer Pablo Alzaga.

What inspired you to make this film – 'It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine' – and why footbag is part of Spanish culture?

We are super obsessed with the decontextualization of football and are always searching for new applications and communication formats. We are also into the concept of souvenir and how can we synthesize the essence of creative football on portable objects.

In one of these researches, we came across with the footbag, an object we used to play with during our childhood. We produced some Matinal custom hacky sacks and wanted to film a small piece focusing on them. I had this reference in mind from the fashion brand Études for years, in which some models are raving at random Paris spots, it’s really cool. I wanted to take the footbag out of context in a similar way, making it aspirational but respecting the legacy of our youth.

At that time we met Paloma, Spain freestyle football champion and of the biggest footbag culture connoiseurs in our country. She was very motivated with the film concept and helped us a lot developing all the narrative. Her performance in the video is amazing.

It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine

What’s your unique relationship with football

Pablo: My relationship with football comes from a classical background, it started in childhood. I was born in San Sebastian,a beautiful, small city in the north of Spain. Everyone there is a Real Sociedad fan, every 15 days the town is colored and white and blue and it is impossible not to breath football in all social interactions.

I’ve been living in Madrid since I was a teenager and I’ve played and consumed football all my life. Having a job in fashion as a photographer, one of the most frequent questions ever heard over short distances has always been 'Oh, do you like football, really? '. The cliché was bidirectional.

It seemed that the sensitivity, values and concerns that we are presupposed as creatives, were incompatible with having an interest in something like football, considered low culture because of all the bad connotations it has.

Over the years we’ve also come across several talents and creative profiles that were into football and discovered that the scene was demanding a space where they could practice and consume this sport from a new perspective and context. That’s the reason why we founded Matinal and our everyday motivation and fuel.

Who you all are?

MATINAL is a creative studio and community focused on the culture around Post Football. We research the diverse forms of sport off the pitch and in third half environments. Post Football goes beyond victory and results –winning matters, but it isn’t everything.

On our timeline, back in 2020 we founded a creative collective from our amateur football team CCP (a team based in the North of Madrid playing in the local league), that eventually opened its space to new voices outside the team and shape Matinal.

As a creative studio, we work on creative direction, production and design with projects focusing on the conversation between football, fashion and culture. But what really motivates us is the development of the creative football scene and the community, through the generation of spaces for meeting, discussion and celebration around the field.

Matinal team is composed by fashion and sports photographer Pablo Alzaga, engineer and football guru Nacho Asensio (both cofounders) and creative and art director Sandra Ramiro, as well as several creative local satellites that collaborate actively with the project.

It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine

It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine

It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine

It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine

It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine

What type of projects are exciting to you & how you want to continue to document & contribute to football culture?

I think the football industry still romanticizes product and performance too much, and there is not enough interest in making processes and storytelling more visible. If there is no real separation between culture and performance, creativity is limited, and that’s why most of mainstream projects always look the same.

So, at Matinal we are pushing the introduction of creative direction in the football industry and constantly learning to use storytelling, places and cities, sub-culture, fashion or social debate to forge new bonds for supporters and find new interpretations of the concept of ‘being a fan’.

It Has Meaning You Cannot Imagine

Credits

Talent: @paloma_freestyle, 3x Spain freestyle football champion and footbag champ connoiseur.

Directors: @jaimevenet & @pabloalzaga.

Stylist: @vaqqqqquero.

© 2026 Where Is Football

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