But Peter Robinson, who has photographed icons such as Diego Maradona, Lionel Messi, Pele and Franz Beckenbauer, admits he has never been a huge fan of the sport itself. Robinson, 82, has travelled to competitions in close to 100 countries in a career he describes as "bonkers". His work is now being celebrated in an exhibition that highlights its focus on the stories of football off the field, photos which curator Hugo Worthy said "tell you a huge amount about football but about life more broadly".
Robinson, who now lives in Rutland, said he believed it was his lack of "fan energy" about football that allowed him to capture unique pictures of the sport. "It's helped me produce different images than the usual sports football photographer," Robinson explained to the BBC. "Because their remit, their shopping lists are the things that are important in the game - goals and incidents.
"I'm destined to shoot these pictures because other people are not. "All of the pictures have got a question mark on it for me - why did this happen like this?" Robinson's photography journey started in the 1960s when, while booking local bands to play in Leicester, he met a group called The Contacts, made up of photography students at the Leicester School of Art, now De Montfort University. He said they had "a good vibe" and he wondered what it would be like to make a living taking photos.
Robinson, who lived in New Parks in Leicester at the time, decided to speak to the course leader even though he did not have a camera or any photographs to show. He chose to study photography at the school in 1964 and instantly took to it. "It took me a day to figure out this is what I wanted to do for the rest of my life," Robinson said.
"You could shoot, and you've made the prints, and then you critique them in class. "I felt like I was Jack the Lad. People were talking about what I had done in class and I just took to this perfectly." While a student, Robinson admits the "last thing I wanted to do" was shoot football pictures.
However as he was "skint", he took a role delivering papers for local publication Football League Review before eventually becoming a photographer there. Robinson went on to work for the Football Association (FA) and was then asked to photograph for FIFA at the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, providing pictures for the official report. He went on to become the football body's official photographer up to the 1994 World Cup and says one of his favourite photos showed Italian captain Franco Baresi receiving a runners-up medal after that tournament's final against Brazil in Los Angeles.
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