The Soccer Exhibition Sitting One Floor Above Dr. King's Papers
- Jason Longshore
- 8 minutes ago
- 7 min read
The National Center for Civil and Human Rights built a soccer exhibition worthy of both the sport and the building. It starts with a banner and ends with a phone call from FIFA.
A group of FIFA officials filed through a half-finished exhibition one afternoon earlier this month. The exhibit was not open yet. Workers were still finishing things. But there were items already mounted on the walls, and one of them stopped a man cold.
He stood there for a while, staring up.
Daniel Fuller, director of curation at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, kept giving the tour. He looked back. The man was still there. The tour continued. He looked back again. Still there. The man was wearing a FIFA sport coat, so Fuller knew he was not a stranger who had wandered in. But something was clearly happening.
When everyone else moved on, Fuller walked back over.
"What's going on here?"
The man asked what he was looking at. Fuller told him it was a hand-painted banner from FC St. Pauli, borrowed from the club's museum in Hamburg. The man asked how he got it. Fuller explained he had visited the museum, gone through the archive with the director, and asked.
The man kept asking, in different ways, as if the answer Fuller kept giving could not possibly be the right one.
Then he asked if Fuller knew who had painted it.
St. Pauli supporters, Fuller said.
The man said: I painted it. I painted it when I was 16. I got into an argument with my parents, ran away from home in Switzerland, and wound up in Hamburg. I wound up in a punk house with kids who were all St. Pauli supporters. Me and my friends painted that on the sidewalk before a match. We did that in 1986.
He had not been to the United States in years. He almost skipped Atlanta entirely, preferring to stay in Miami where all his work was. He came for one day.
He pulled out his supporters card.
They took a photo together, the two of them, him pointing up at the banner. Fuller sent it to the St. Pauli Museum that morning. The museum staff wrote back immediately.
That's Gert. We haven't seen him in forever. We know that guy.
That story is not the exhibit. It is what the exhibit makes possible.
"The People's Game: Soccer and Human Rights" is now open on the third floor of The National Center for Civil and Human Rights in downtown Atlanta, where it will remain through June 2027. Presented by Gallagher and the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation in partnership with Atlanta United, it is the kind of exhibition that the World Cup summer in Atlanta warranted and that, if we are being direct about it, most institutions would not have been equipped to build.
Fuller is not a soccer professional. He is the Director of Curation who grew up in Upstate New York watching VHS tapes of Ukrainian soccer with the brothers across the street, then talking about Bohemian FC and Shakhtar Donetsk with the kid whose father had played professionally in Greece. Soccer was always the sport for that friend group. Not because it was cool, but because it was theirs.
That background matters, because this exhibition is not the product of institutional soccer enthusiasm or World Cup programming opportunism. It is the product of a soccer person with a historian's instincts and an archivist's obsession, who spent a year building toward it, waited for grants to come through, and then had approximately three and a half months to make it real.
He flew into Hamburg and went straight from the airport to the St. Pauli Museum without stopping. He took a tour, went through the archive, attended a match, slept four hours, and caught a cab to the airport at 3:30 in the morning to get to Dublin. The next morning he met with Bohemian FC. That night he went to a Bohemian match, slept a few more hours, and flew to Glasgow to visit the National Museum of Scottish Football. Then he went to São Paulo, where he visited six soccer museums in three days, including the Pelé Museum in Santos.
He contacted somewhere between 23 and 30 clubs and organizations worldwide to borrow items. One never wrote back. Everyone else said yes.
The physical exhibition organizes itself into four sections. "The Field of Resistance" works through how fans and players use the game when other platforms have been shut down. "We Take Care of Us" documents what soccer communities do when people need something. "Many Voices, One Game" is built around a structure that might be the exhibit's most distinctive element. "Play Moments" is a foosball activity built around the concept of teamwork rather than winning.
That third section is worth understanding. In the center of the exhibition floor, Fuller and his team built a large sculptural soccer ball, open on one side, with seating for four people inside and space for more outside. A speaker plays 38 voice recordings from 23 countries. Fuller gave each contributor a loose prompt and then told them to talk about whatever the game means to them.
The voices include the owner of the Portland Timbers, the president of Bayern München, Miles Robinson, who played for Atlanta United and now represents the United States national team, and Carri Davis, the first Black woman to represent England at the international level.
They also include people from a factory floor in Africa. The ball company Alive and Kicking relocated its production from Europe to the continent but kept wages identical to what it paid its European workers. The people who sew those balls talk about what it means to work for a company that treats them fairly, and then to watch matches from around the world on the weekends knowing their balls are out there on the pitch.
They include voices from IACT, a New York-based organization that runs programs in refugee camps in Mexico and Chad. The kids in those camps had made the journey north through South America and Central America, crossing borders and losing almost everything familiar, and their whole lives had been transformed. IACT brought in soccer coaches, built fields, and provided jerseys. The voices in the ball describe how a little bit of normal life came back.
The range is intentional. The exhibit does not make a single argument about what the game means. It makes space for 38 different answers and trusts the listener to understand that all of them are true simultaneously.
The Clarkston thread is one Fuller noted early as something visitors keep bringing up. Fugees Family, the organization in Clarkston, Georgia that has built a soccer program around refugee children for years, is part of the exhibition. That is not incidental to an Atlanta soccer exhibition. For anyone who has followed the story of how this game grew in Georgia, Clarkston is a foundational text. The fact that it sits next to stories from Hamburg and São Paulo and Robben Island in this building is exactly the kind of curatorial statement that distinguishes this from a display case full of jerseys.
The legends jersey wall does have jerseys. Signed shirts representing players across generations and nations, from Pelé to Lamine Yamal, Zinedine Zidane to George Weah, who, as it happens, was present for an early walkthrough of the exhibition and was, by Fuller's account, the pied piper of that particular afternoon.
But the jerseys exist in a building that also holds Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s personal papers. That proximity is not coincidental. FC St. Pauli understood it immediately. Their representatives kept returning to that point: their club, and what it stands for, gets to be in the same building as the King papers. That mattered enough to make everything else easy.
The other story that runs under the surface of this exhibition involves the Afghanistan women's national football team.
When the Taliban retook the country, the players scattered. Norway. Canada. New Zealand. The United States. Spread across the globe, they spent years fighting through FIFA's rules to be recognized as a national team again, arguing their case in courts while FIFA struggled to understand why they could not simply play home matches in a country that would imprison them for existing.
Fuller was coordinating with the team in the weeks before the exhibition opened, getting materials together, watching the timeline compress. On a Friday, he was told everything was coming: voice memos, emails, a FedEx shipment, all of it on the way. Friday came. Nothing. No WhatsApp replies. No emails. Nothing over the weekend.
On Monday morning, a message came through.
Sorry about all that. Things were crazy after our court victory.
FIFA had reversed its ruling. The team was recognized again. Everyone had four days to pack up their lives and move to New Zealand to start training.
And everyone did.
Fuller has three more exhibitions ready to go, fully conceptualized, waiting for a version of a soccer-specific museum that does not currently exist. The National Center for Civil and Human Rights will keep this one on the third floor for the next year, and Fuller plans to fill that time with speakers, filmmakers, and players brought in for conversations and panels.
If you go, find the soccer ball in the center of the floor. Sit inside it. Thirty-eight voices from twenty-three countries, one after another, all of them answering the same loose question in their own way.
It will make you think about what the game means to you.