What if your club’s entire history looked back at you?
Imagine walking through a century of football culture—not as a timeline or trophy case, but as a crowd. Thousands of eyes. Some blurry. Some hopeful. Some crying. Some lit by flares.
Old men in black-and-white suits. Children in plastic replica kits.
Women who never missed a match. Grandfathers holding up newborns in scarves.
This is what I tried to capture in two new digital mosaics—commissions by the Hellenic Football Federation to mark 100 years of Olympiacos and OFI Crete.
Two crests made of hundreds of moments. Some victorious. Some painful.
All imagined, but built on truth.
Because sometimes fiction, if done with care, can tell the truth better than fact.
Old men in black-and-white suits. Children in plastic replica kits.
Women who never missed a match. Grandfathers holding up newborns in scarves.
This is what I tried to capture in two new digital mosaics—commissions by the Hellenic Football Federation to mark 100 years of Olympiacos and OFI Crete.
Two crests made of hundreds of moments. Some victorious. Some painful.
All imagined, but built on truth.
Because sometimes fiction, if done with care, can tell the truth better than fact.
Olympiacos: A Century of Passion
This digital mosaic, commissioned by the Hellenic Football Federation, celebrates 100 years of Olympiacos through the lens of its devoted fans. Composed of hundreds of imagined photographs spanning decades, the artwork captures the raw emotions, cultural nuances, and timeless dedication of Olympiacos supporters. Each image is crafted to feel like a real memory, blending fiction with historical accuracy to honor the soul of the club.
This digital mosaic, commissioned by the Hellenic Football Federation, celebrates 100 years of Olympiacos through the lens of its devoted fans. Composed of hundreds of imagined photographs spanning decades, the artwork captures the raw emotions, cultural nuances, and timeless dedication of Olympiacos supporters. Each image is crafted to feel like a real memory, blending fiction with historical accuracy to honor the soul of the club.
OFI Crete: A Century of Dedication
Honoring 100 years of OFI Crete, this black-and-white digital mosaic offers a poignant tribute to the club's loyal fanbase. Made up of countless imagined photographs, the artwork reflects the enduring spirit and commitment of OFI Crete supporters across generations. Through meticulous attention to detail in clothing, expressions, and atmosphere, the piece evokes genuine human connection and nostalgia.
Honoring 100 years of OFI Crete, this black-and-white digital mosaic offers a poignant tribute to the club's loyal fanbase. Made up of countless imagined photographs, the artwork reflects the enduring spirit and commitment of OFI Crete supporters across generations. Through meticulous attention to detail in clothing, expressions, and atmosphere, the piece evokes genuine human connection and nostalgia.
Why Fans, Not Players?
Because football is not just played. It’s lived.
The fans are the soul of the sport.
They stay. Through droughts, demotions, and decades.
They pass the flame across generations, in cafés, on balconies, in bedtime stories.
Players are celebrated—and rightly so.
But even the greatest may play five, ten, fifteen years.
The fans? They’re there for fifty. Seventy.
Many players become fans before they play.
And the best of them never stop being fans after they retire.
This is not about ignoring the stars. It’s about honoring the galaxy they orbit.
This is not “AI art.” It’s cultural storytelling through synthetic memory.
Yes, I used generative tools—Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, OpenAI Sora and others.
But this wasn’t about pushing prompts or aesthetics. It was about reconstructing time.
I built fictional photographs as if they had really been taken—during actual decades, by actual people.
I studied the photographic styles of every era from 1925 to 2025:
• Printing processes, vignetting, focal lengths
• Clothing cuts, hair styles, stadium architecture
• Emotional tone—ecstasy and agony, sun and shadow
Each image tries to feel like a memory. Not a stock photo. Not an image bank-perfect fan. But someone real.
This is not branding. It’s a portrait of a crowd, for the crowd.
Too often in sports visuals, we treat the fan as an “element.” A device. A statistic.
What if we honored them instead?
What if the actual human experience of following a club—across generations, locations, classes, genders—was the raw material?
That’s the logic behind these pieces.
No influencers. No generic models. No borrowed faces. Just real-feeling people.
People who could be your cousin. Or your uncle. Or your younger self.
“The crowd is not the twelfth man. It is the first.
Without it, there’s no reason for a match.”
— Arrigo Sacchi, Italian coach & football thinker
There’s more than one way to enter these images.
At a distance: club pride, bold graphics, familiar symbols.
Closer: photographs that might make you pause—“Wait, have I seen that one before?”
Closer still: textures, moments, faces that feel eerily intimate, even though they never happened.
These works are not just commemorative. They’re investigative.
What does a fan look like when no one is watching?
How does loyalty age?
Can an AI help us visualize the soul of a community—not in an abstract way, but in human form?
One last thing. A personal one.
This collaboration with the Federation wasn’t just professional. It was emotional.
My late mother worked at the Hellenic Football Federation for over 20 years.
To be asked to create something so symbolic, so embedded in the Greek football tradition, felt like a quiet way to honor her.
In the end, it’s always about people.
Always.
Creative Industry Box: What Sport Marketeers Can Learn
“Fans don’t want to be targeted. They want to be included.”
These mosaics are not ads. But they hold a key lesson for storytelling in sports branding:
Celebrate participation, not just performance.
Use authenticity as raw material—not just “authentic-looking” content.
Build multi-entry-point visuals that reward deeper engagement. Zooming in matters.
What if your next campaign celebrated the unknown faces behind every ticket sold?
Creative Philosophy Box: What This Teaches About GenAI
“Prompting” is not the art. It’s the brushstroke.
This project uses GenAI, but never blindly. Every image is art-directed, era-aware, and emotionally composed. Historical references shape every “photo.”
Fan archetypes guide character creation.
Narrative tension (victory, loss, ritual) informs posture, clothing, and scene.
This is not random generation.
It’s synthetic memory-making—a design process, not a machine output.
The AI-generated fan photos — spanning from 1925 to today — were created using Stable Diffusion, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, OpenAI Sora and other models primarily via ComfyUI and Automatic1111 environments.
Photographic accuracy was guided by studies of historical techniques, materials, and moods across eras.
The mosaics themselves were entirely hand-crafted, using my custom TsevisMozaix system in combination with Synthetik Studio Artist Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator for final refinement and compositional depth.
On the photo-grid above: Signing the artworks during the exclusive dinner before the final. With the team leading representatives Ilias Poursanidis (OFI) and Christian Karembeu (OSFP) and the artworks. Vera and me with Maria Gkouma, Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer (CMCO) of the Hellenice Football Federation.
Many thanks to the Hellenic Football Federation for their trust, their openness and their support.
Special thanks to Maria Gkouma for the inspiration, the great collaboration and the creative collaboration.
Printed by Diagramma S.A. | PR photos courtesy of Argiris Makris.
Special thanks to Maria Gkouma for the inspiration, the great collaboration and the creative collaboration.
Printed by Diagramma S.A. | PR photos courtesy of Argiris Makris.
Useful sources and further reading:
1. How AI is helping to recreate childhood memories, Gerry Hadden
2. Amplifying memories through AI, Domestic Data Drifters
3. The History of Photography, Daniel Wright
4. Art, Community and AI: Images for an Affective Memory. Jacob Bañuelos Capistrán, Diego Zavala-Scherer, Nohemí Lugo Rodríguez
5. Football fan culture and politics in modern Greece: the process of fandom radicalization during the austerity era, Yiannis Zaimakis, University of Crete
6. Affective Outcomes of Membership in a Sport Fan Community, Brandon Mastromartino, James J Zhang
7. AI On The Field: How Tech Is Elevating The Fan Experience. Forbes Technology Council
8. How AI is helping broadcasters increase their fan engagement, Magnifi
9. Mosaics in Olympic Art, Charis Tsevis
10. Nikos Galis and Inspirational Mosaic Art, Charis Tsevis
9. Mosaics in Olympic Art, Charis Tsevis
10. Nikos Galis and Inspirational Mosaic Art, Charis Tsevis
11. Vassilis Spanoulis: The legend 7, Charis Tsevis