The one-two pass is the simplest and most beautiful move in football: two players, one ball, a defender beaten through trust and timing. Matteo Cossu named his magazine after it. Uno Due launched in 2014 as a yearly print publication about football and its reverberations through society and culture — not match reports or transfer gossip, but essays, photography, and reflections on the game as a lens for understanding identity, politics, place, and belonging. The first two issues, themed "Post–Mundial" and "Identity," were written in Italian. By the third, Cossu switched to English and brought in designers A.A. Trabucco Campos and Lorenzo Fanton to rebuild the magazine from the ground up.
That redesign turned heads. PRINT Magazine called the third volume, themed "It's Personal," a new gold standard for sports magazine design. The roughly 250-page issue used an interchanging combination of Unica77 and LL Bradford typefaces by Lineto, with layouts that played with typographic expression to capture the energy and spirit of the game through form and composition. The grid was built in one-two units — an echo of the pass — and openers featured colour harmonies positioned in pairs, giving the entire publication a rhythmic visual pulse. The flexicover was illustrated by Azar Kazimir. At $43 a copy, it was positioned as an object, not a throwaway.
Uno Due belongs to a growing constellation of independent football publications — alongside titles like Howler, Eight by Eight, and Mundial — that treat the sport not as content to be consumed between ads but as a cultural force worth examining with the same seriousness given to art, architecture, or literature. Its annual rhythm gives each issue the weight of a book rather than the urgency of a deadline. For readers who believe that football is about far more than what happens between the white lines, Uno Due offers the pass that opens up the space.
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