Fantasy football: a kickabout with the surrealists – in pictures

During the second world war, many artists fled to Marseille, where André Breton assembled a group of surrealists every Sunday to play creative games. Inspired by this, author Mike McInnes and artist Matt Kenyon imagined the surrealists as a football team, assigning positions and made-up quotes to figures including Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo and Albert Camus (who was actually a goalkeeper in Algeria in the late 1920s). The football cards appear in McInnes’s book Homo Passiens: Man the Footballer (Meyer & Meyer Sport). “Surrealism and football are a very good match,” says McInnes. “There’s a certain type of brainwave among fans when they’re watching games – a kind of dream state. And dream psychology was an important part of surrealism.”