Stine Goya on Finding the Softness in Football Culture

Football culture has never ended at the final whistle. For Stine Goya and Umbro’s second collaboration, Where We Meet, the two brands leave the pitch behind and turn instead to everything that happens around it: crowded pubs, greasy spoon cafés, post-match walks home, and bathroom walls layered with graffiti and confessions.

Following their first collaboration in May 2025, the new five-piece capsule takes 90s British football culture as its starting point, but approaches it through the spaces and rituals that make the game feel communal. “For me, football culture isn’t necessarily about the pitch,” Goya says. “I love the things that happen around it, the pub, the walk home after the game, the intensity of emotions, the music, the bathroom wall covered in someone’s handwriting.”

That interest in the imperfect and lived-in carries directly into the clothes. Three box-cut collared jerseys sit alongside a slim-fit T-shirt with a hand-painted checker print and a lightweight long-sleeve sweatshirt inspired by the scribbled surfaces of a well-worn pub bathroom. Across the jerseys and T-shirt, Umbro’s familiar crest is reworked in lace, softening a symbol otherwise closely associated with traditional sportswear.

For Goya, the contrast is part of the appeal. References to old wallpaper become hand-painted prints, while lace tablecloths are translated into the Umbro crest. “I like this tough and grimy mixed with the tender and personal,” she says. “It makes it fun while still having substance.”

In recent years, football has become increasingly difficult to separate from fashion. Jerseys have moved well beyond the stadium, while the aesthetics surrounding the sport have found a new audience across runways, nightlife, and street style. For Goya, though, the renewed interest goes beyond the clothes.

“I think people are craving that feeling of belonging to something bigger than themselves, and football has always offered that in such a raw and unfiltered way,” she says, pointing as well to a wider nostalgia for the ’90s.

The same idea carries into the campaign, which stars professional dancer Didde-Mie Lykke inside a local pub. Instead of posing against the setting, Lykke moves through it, turning the pub into something closer to a lived space than a campaign backdrop.

Rather than returning to the spectacle of the pitch, Where We Meet focuses on the culture that forms around it—the places people gather, the rituals they repeat, and the messier moments that end up giving the game its meaning.

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Stine Goya x Umbro’s Where We Meet collection is now available online.