TERRA magazine: What Football Means To Me - Laura Gates

Laura Gates is a photographer. She has published two photobooks on Everton, and a third — documenting the men’s team’s first season at Hill Dickinson Stadium — will be released in summer 2026.

For a long time, I thought my relationship with football belonged firmly on the pitch. When you grow up playing, it becomes your routine — spending hours in school clock-watching until training, anxiously waiting for matchday and then waking up on Monday with an aching body ready to do it all over again. When the time came to leave playing behind, a meaningful chapter of my life closed. Football gave me so much: friendships, relationships, successes, trophies and lots of life lessons. There is a specific kind of quiet that settles in when you walk away from the game; for a while, I worried that I’d lost that sense of belonging for good.

As it turns out, the game wasn't done with me. I just needed to look at it through a different lens.

I dabbled in photography at university but never pursued it as I didn’t think I was good enough to carve out a career. Thing is, I didn’t know there was so much more to taking photos than I realised. My early work was studio-based or focussed on structures rather than humans. I used to think people in photos ‘ruin’ a shot. But when I started to focus on Lincoln City, I realised that people, fans and community are what football is truly about.

Years later, when I brought that same perspective to capturing Everton, it changed my life. I’ll always be an Evertonian, but my camera allowed me to open up and form friendships globally with fans that travel far and wide to watch the Toffees. It is only because of the power of football, my camera and Everton that I have made friends as far away as Australia and across the U.S. It’s incredible.

Picking up the camera again wasn't just about capturing ninety minutes of sport, it became about capturing real, raw community in action. Working on my first photobook then forced me to slow down, to look closer at the faces of fans on matchday, the shared tension, the collective anxieties, the relief and joy of a goal. Documenting their stories helped me rebuild my own.

Then, FC St Helens Women came along. The missing piece of the puzzle. Being around the women's game has re-energised me in ways I didn't see coming. It gave me back the matchday routine I thought I’d left behind, but without the pressure of performance. Instead, it offered the pure, unadulterated joy of being part of a team’s journey. It reminded me of why I fell in love with this game in the first place.

Football isn't just a sport, it’s a massive, living network of human connections. It’s the brief conversation with a stranger in the stands that makes you feel less alone. It’s the shared moment with a player running towards my lens after scoring a goal. By finding a new way to exist within the football world, I didn't just find a routine, I found a place, a career, lifelong friends. The game gave me joy when things felt dark, structure when things felt chaotic, and a reminder that no matter how long you stay away, you can always come back and feel like you never left.

Visit @_greenfootball and @_earthfc on Instagram for more stories about what football means to photographers, creators and fans around the world.

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Words and images: Laura Gates