Building on Lemn Sissay’s 2025 specially commissioned poem The Stadium Speaks, and inspired by L.S. Lowry’s Going to the Match and the instantly recognisable forms of Subbuteo players, the work explores football as a collective experience, where individuals, stories and identities come together to form something greater.
Following this year’s Black History Month theme of “Honouring our Communities”, the installation features eight photographic portraits of members of the Manchester City community, from footballers to fans and staff members.
Find out more about our participants
Each portrait is carried by the figures, making the people and their stories an integral part of the sculpture.
- Footballers: Jade Rose and Rico Lewis
- Staff: Dean, Victoria and Aadi
- Fans: Jahmal (City Matters Representative), Bibi and Kwesi
A series of abstract, line-drawn characters are transformed into three-dimensional steel figures. Each adopts a different pose associated with football and its supporters - running, reaching, celebrating, carrying or standing together.
Their individuality gives the group its character, while their relationships create the sense of a collective crowd.
Each figure rises from a weighted cast-concrete base, referencing the distinctive form of a Subbuteo player.
The steel and concrete also draw on the physical language of the stadium: robust, familiar materials associated with terraces, structure and the architecture surrounding the game.
Running throughout the installation is a continuous knitted football scarf incorporating selected words and phrases from Sissay’s The Stadium Speaks.
The scarf connects one figure to the next, carrying the poem through the work.
Its words rise, fall, stretch and move through the crowd - sometimes held overhead, sometimes passed between the characters - as though the poem itself is being shared from person to person.
Find out more about the people featured in We Stand Together and read their stories here.
The installation will be in place until the end of October and can be found at the bottom of the bridge on Sir Howard Bernstein Way.
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