Kypseli Mundial: Reclaiming the City Through Football

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Kypseli Mundial: Reclaiming the City Through Football

WORDS Ivan Ascor
PHOTOGRAPHY Max Pigott

JULY 2026

On an early summer weekend in the central Athenian neighbourhood of Kypseli, sixteen men's teams, four women's teams and two youth teams gather for the annual football tournament and cultural festival organised by and for the city's migrant communities.

Kypseli Mundial was started by Oska Paul and Moussa Sangaré in 2024. Since then it has quickly grown into one of the largest community-led events in Athens. The teams primarily represent national community organisations, with the tournament bringing together around 500 players and hundreds more spectators.

Off the pitch, the festival includes a sprawling programme of music and dance performances, skateboarding lessons, drumming and self-defence workshops, discussions on decolonial struggles in Sudan and Palestine, exhibitions on the history of migrant activism in Greece, film screenings, a food and handicrafts bazaar, and sexual health clinic offering free testing and condoms. Each activity is organised by local community groups, reflecting the interests and priorities of the communities themselves.

The initial idea for Kypseli Mundial grew out of research that Oska was conducting about the history of African activism in Athens. During interviews with various people from the city's African communities, he learned of a similar tournament started by the Union of Africans in Greece between 2007 and 2013.

"We called it the African Cup of Greece.” recalls Mamadou Ba in the podcast documentary Oska made about Pan African organising in Greece. Mamadou was part of the organising committee for that tournament, which he remembers as important meeting point and space of celebration, solidarity and visibility for diverse African communities in Athens:

“They were festive moments, moments of joy, where the children, the young people, the women, everyone... We didn't think about the brutal repression we were experiencing. It was just a moment where you could think like a normal person. Sit down, play, laugh, meet people, all that. The atmosphere was a madness! Everybody singing, the Senegalese came with drums. We forgot about this precarious life. For a moment, you forgot about all that."

However, when the economic crisis hit Greece in 2009, life became particularly challenging for migrant communities. In political debates, migrants were framed as responsible for the soaring levels of unemployment and breakdown of public services created by the extreme austerity measures. This led to the rise of the far-right party Golden Dawn, which began coordinating violent racist attacks across the city, often with the support of the police. Because of Mamadou’s activism, he soon became a target.

“Golden Dawn had come tagging our offices with graffiti. It became dangerous, what we were doing. They went on raids, beating people up. The police didn't intervene. The police let them. One day, they waited for me at the bus stop. They knew where I worked. They came on four motorbikes, and they were all armed with iron bars. They left me bleeding. That’s when I left Greece. A lot of people left Greece. After that the tournament stopped.”

Ten years later, Oska and Moussa, who is the President of the self-organised Ivory Coast community and an important political advocate of migrant rights in Greece, decided to revive the tournament.

“We spent a few weeks sharing ideas”, Oska says. “From the start, we knew we wanted to create an event where the players and the communities they represent feel that they are participating in a serious football tournament. Too often, sporting events involving migrants, especially young Black men, are treated as charity projects or vehicles for integration, and always focus on people’s identities as displaced people. People out of place. You see that in the names of other tournaments, like the "Refugee World Cup" or the "Unity Trophy." We wanted to move away from that. Kypseli Mundial is not about refugees or migrants nor is it about proving that Black and Brown people are peaceful or capable of integrating in European society. It is about bringing together the communities that are already part of the city, whether they've been here for decades or arrived more recently, and together claiming this place, this neighbourhood as our own.”

Kypseli has long been one of Athens' most diverse neighbourhoods and an important site of solidarity for communities from across the world. The restaurants, grocery shops, churches, salons, cafés and community organisations are evidence of that history.

"Kypseli is the centre of the world. Migrants have existed in Kypseli long before this festival was born," says Adla Shashati of the Greek Forum of Migrants, a union that represents migrant communities in Greece and which also helped organise the first two editions of Kypseli Mundial.

"All these people” Adla continues in the KM24 Matchday Programme, “are individuals who have raised their children here, set up businesses, rented and then bought houses, and are part of Kypseli. It is important to organise such common activities, to play, to have fun and to get to know each other. It's equally important to recognise the contribution of all these people. For the Greek state we are invisible. We live together, but we are apart. We've grown accustomed to living 'half' lives, and this is a problem that doesn't just affect us; it affects Greek society as a whole. [Kypseli Mundial is a message of coexistence, participation, solidarity, and integration. However, integration according to our definition. Our integration is with strong social participation and social action."

Kypseli’s reputation has swung between extremes over the decades, cast at times as dangerous and heavily policed, and more recently rebranded as the city's most vibrant, "up-and-coming" district. Yet both narratives tend to erase the people and communities who shaped Kypseli in the first place, with rising rents and gentrification now threatening to push many of them out. That tension sits within a broader European context, in which Black and Brown communities face increasingly punitive and violent immigration and policing policies.

What the festival offers is something different from either story. As Moussa explains,

“Kypseli Mundial is a glimpse of the city as it could be, as it should be. Kypseli is not a problem to be feared nor is it a trendy brand to be marketed. It is a living community shaped by the people who built their lives here over many years. At Kypseli Mundial, we don't ask for papers from people. We don't ask where you come from. There are no questions. People are free here and that is something we've been waiting for a long time! You can see the smile on people's faces and that is what we wanted to create. People are proud. I am proud. We are making a new story of migration in Greece."

This year, the tournament took place across two weekends, culminating in a final day that brought together hundreds of footballers, musicians, artists, parents, friends and supporters. Alongside the men’s, women’s and youth cup finals, people took part in workshops, enjoyed food from across the world, and danced to live performances that continued well past midnight.

At the awards ceremony, Nelson Nkwocha, captain of the Nigerian team, who have now won Kypseli Mundial in consecutive years in 2025 and 2026, captured what the tournament is ultimately about:

“It is a great privilege to bring everybody together. That is the most important thing. The cup is not really important. The most important thing is bringing everybody together, and I am happy to see everybody here because this cup is for Kypseli.”

Kypseli Mundial is always looking for financial support. If you would like to donate or sponsor the event please contact the organising committee at kypselimundial@gmail.com or via instagram @kypselimundial

Max Pigott is London-based documentary photographer interested in the ways history, politics and everyday life overlap. He is drawn to work that informs, moves, or challenges, and aims to create photographs that stand on their own, communicate directly and honestly, and that serve the story rather than ego. Max discovered Kypseli Mundial while spending time in Athens and working with Lighthouse Relief, who entered a team into the tournament, some of whom feature in these photographs. Through them, Max met Oska and was introduced to the wider community surrounding the tournament. You can find more of Max’s work on his website and Instagram.

“The more I see, the less interested I become in confirming what I think I know, and the more attentive I become to what is actually there,” Max on how seeing the world informs his work.

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