Paying homage to the Sistine Chapel, ten of the world’s biggest football/soccer fresco covers 800 square meters and features the likes of Beckham (Real Madrid and England), Kaka (AC Milan and Brazil), and other World Cup 2006 football greats signed to Adidas.

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Other stars looking down upon travelers from all over the world are German national team captain Michael Ballack (Chelsea FC) and his team mate Lukas Podolski (FC Bayern Munich), Zinédine Zidane (Real Madrid and France), Raúl (Real Madrid and Spain), Lionel Messi (FC Barcelona and Argentina), Juan Román Riquelme (Villareal CF and Argentina), Nakamura (Celtic Glasgow and Japan) and Djibril Cissé (Liverpool FC and France).

Hamburg-based illustrator Felix Reidenbach spent 40 days on the project, requiring four days for each of the individual players. This advertising-as-art creative dream is one of a series of spectacular advertising spaces being used in prominent and also unusual locations all over Germany by Adidas as Official Sponsor, Supplier and Licensee of the 2006 FIFA World Cup 2006 and supplier to various players and teams (including Germany, France, Spain, Argentina and Japan). Another advert, a 65 meter wide and 18 meter high image of Oliver Kahn, shows the German goalkeeper diving for the ball across the four-lane highway leading to and from Munich Airport.

Photographer Roberto Gómez Torres of Tiempo Digital shot the accompanying panorama while in Germany to watch the Mexico games versus Iran, Angola and Portugal. Notice the partial view of the Cologne (Köln) Cathedral through one of the windows. “The kid on the panorama pointing at the sky is actually a puppet”, he says. “It is part of the Adidas campaign named "José +10" shown on many TV commercials during the FIFA World Cup when two boys from Spain made their street teams choosing actual soccer stars from the present and the past.”
Email Photographer: Roberto[at]tiempo-digital[dot]com