He's shot 13 World Cups but isn't a football fan

Robinson's association with the tournament stretches back to the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, the first played in colour and the first beamed around the globe by satellite. BBC Sport reports he has covered every edition since, a run that now spans from Pelé's Brazil to Qatar 2022, with the 2026 finals in the United States, Mexico and Canada up next on his calendar.

That is 52 years of World Cups shot by one photographer, a continuity almost nobody else in the sport can claim. Managers come and go, broadcasters rotate their commentary boxes every cycle, but Robinson has kept turning up with his camera, tournament after tournament, decade after decade.

The outsider's eye

The BBC Sport profile frames Robinson as a 'non-football fan', a label that sits oddly against a career spent inside the ropes of the sport's biggest stage. The piece doesn't spell out exactly what that means in practice, whether it's indifference to results, a lack of allegiance to any one club, or simply a professional distance from the game he's spent his life documenting.

Whatever the explanation, it hasn't stopped him producing work that's lasted. A photographer without a rooting interest has no reason to chase the obvious shot, the celebrating captain, the designated hero. That kind of detachment tends to produce the frames nobody else thought to take.

Why this lands now

Robinson's archive arrives back in view as the sport heads toward the 2026 World Cup, which would mark his fourteenth tournament if he's there with a camera as expected. Fifty-two years of World Cup football already filtered through one lens is a visual record that very few institutions in the sport, let alone individuals, can match.

Football's memory tends to live in scorelines and YouTube clips. Robinson's contribution has been quieter: showing up, camera ready, at every World Cup since colour television was still a novelty.