Period: 2020 - ongoing
Role: Personal brand
Product: Personal project focused on publishing; writing and photography
This personal project began during the pandemic but has its roots in 2017 when I started writing a blog sharing my personal opinions on football. In 2020, it evolved into something more serious including a new logo and an Instagram page.
I’ve been wanting to develop my writing skills. I think this feeling comes after working with design documentation for many years. I have been refining my writing by documenting Romanian football stories in English, using visuals and football shirts to engage and educate younger Romanian generations. With no other source offering this in English, and the Romanian diaspora growing in recent years, I decided to fill that gap.
As one of the largest Romanian match-worn shirt collectors outside the football industry, I’ve built a private collection of over 300 football shirts. Over time, the project has expanded into various mini-ventures, such as organizing shirt exhibitions, shirt databases and being invited to design or consult on football shirts—an ongoing and pleasant journey. Linking here the full story that can be read on my Medium blog.
Links:
How it started: In 2015, I set a personal goal to read one book every month. Instead of novels, I focused on self-improvement books. Growing up in a town with a rich football culture, I had been surrounded by the sport from a young age. Motivated to understand what makes a great footballer, I began collecting autobiographies of former international players. My goal was to learn about the self-improvement strategies they used to achieve greatness and the lessons they picked up along the way.
Challenge: Football player autobiographies were not popular back then, or common. Most of the stories shared were generic and sometimes a collection of newspaper articles and an idea or two about their childhood. Filtering topics like greatness or improvements was difficult. At the end of 2015 I decided to start a blog to share the unique insights I had discovered from these books. These weren’t the usual, generic pieces of information you’d find in a newspaper. Instead, they were small but powerful details that had a significant impact on the world stage of football. These were insights you could only uncover by connecting the dots across the autobiographies of different footballers, revealing the nuances of their journeys to greatness.
Role: I decided to do the same, but for Romanian football. My journey began by digging into the small, often overlooked details of Romanian football history. However, writing wasn’t my strong suit—and it still isn’t. Instead, I turned to something more visual: Romanian football shirts. Using these shirts, I started sharing interesting stories and details about their significance and impact on Romanian football.
Strangely enough, I discovered far more than I had expected. Over time, this passion grew into a strong community, one that continues to thrive today through my On Romanian Football account. It’s a journey I’m still deeply connected to, alongside the people who share this love for the game and its stories.
Some examples:
