Creative & Directed by Hello Shovel’s Adam Connolly, while at Visual Domain
Play Football
No matter where you play football, the feeling is the same.
For Football Australia, this campaign was built around a simple idea: the line between grassroots football and the professional stage is thinner than people think. Because every Socceroo and Matilda started exactly where the next generation is now.
About the project
Created for Football Australia, this campaign leaned heavily into the idea of pathway visually connecting grassroots players with Australia’s biggest football stars through carefully choreographed match cuts and layered transitions between community football and professional broadcast footage.
The campaign was designed to remind audiences that football belongs to everyone. Not just the elite level. The same excitement, pressure, joy and obsession exists at every stage of the journey.
A huge part of the work happened long before cameras rolled. Because the entire campaign relied on precision match cuts, the process started with a deep discovery and pre-edit phase, digging through existing broadcast footage to identify moments that could realistically be recreated with grassroots players. Every camera move, body position and movement pattern needed to line up perfectly for the transitions to work seamlessly.
Some moments were especially technical, including a clip of a young player crossing the ball into a Socceroo player who heads in a goal.
The final campaign created a visual bridge between grassroots football and the professional game, reinforcing the idea that every player is connected by the same emotions, rituals and love for football.
Across BVOD and digital, the match-cut technique helped turn the pathway message into something audiences could feel rather than simply hear. The transitions between local and elite football weren’t treated as separate worlds, they became part of the same story.
Because football has never belonged to just one level of the game. Football is everyones game.
