A 95-year-old camera at the World Cup: Fareed Kotb's 20-frame gamble

Fareed Kotb had already shot two World Cups – Russia in 2018, Qatar in 2022 – with digital gear. For the 2026 tournament in Canada, he wanted a different kind of image. He wanted to connect to the very first World Cup in 1930, nearly a century earlier.

So he bought a camera from 1930.

Kotb found it in Cairo's vintage camera market, buried in a big box. It was a Zeiss Ikon Ideal 250/11. After he traced the serial number, he learned the camera had belonged to a photographer who used it to shoot players before the 1954 World Cup. The same photographer also captured Egyptian athletes before the 1936 Berlin Olympics.