[2] Stylistically Gleizes' Football Players exemplifies the principle of mobile perspective laid out in Du "Cubisme", written by himself and French painter Jean Metzinger.

[4] It was purchased from the Dalmau family between 1953 and 1955 by Stephen Hahn and (The Sidney Janis Gallery); sold in 1955 to Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, New York.

[7] Moving away from his quasi-monochromatic works of 1910 and 1911, Gleizes employs a wide array of primary colors, grays, earth tones and umbers.

Unlike the preferred subject matter of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque (e.g., still lives or guitar players), Gleizes has depicted a vast scene, combining a sporting event with a semi-urban or industrial landscape in the background.

On the bottom left is a man, possibly a fallen player, holding what appears to be a round shaped item in his hand.

The rich juxtaposition of divers elements present within the piece are tied together in a Cubist idiom by an interlocking grid of diagonal lines, facets, intersecting plains and spheres.

Painted during an ongoing debate over the virtues of Cubism and Futurism, Les Joueurs de football is a prime example of the artists desire to reconcile the problem of representing the subject from different points of view simultaneously, and/or in successive stages of motion (both the physical displacement of an object and the movement of thought).

We can no longer say, now, that Cubism is obscure [triste], gala rather, grand [noblesse], measure [mesure] and audacity.Les Joueurs de football is testament to the close association of two artists, Metzinger and Gleizes, and to their shared social, cultural and philosophical conviction that painting represented more than a fleeting glimpse of the world in which they lived, that indeed by showing multiple facets of a subject captured at successive intervals in time simultaneously, a truer more complete image would emerge.

Football Players exemplifies, too, the general freedom of the artist to interpret the subject matter without producing photograph resemblance or ‘realistic’ portrayal of an object or event.

[12][14] In both the Gleizes painting and those of Delaunay, the identification with soccer has commonly been made, however, the ball is oval and the hands are being used; clearly identifying the subject of these works as depictions of rugby football games.

[15] The first rugby competition was held in 1892 as a one-off championship game between two Paris-based teams, the Racing Club de France and Stade Français.

The related sport-themed work of Rousseau, Metzinger, Gleizes, Delaunay, Boccioni (and later Lhote), reflected the enthusiasm for sport that fascinated the French spirit at the time.

[12] Art historian Daniel Robbins writes: The role of team sport, especially in the context of mass audience participation, reflects another interest of the artists of Passy.

The details of the provenance are provided in a letter of 10 February 1970 from Daniel Robbins to J. Carter Brown, copy in NGA curatorial files.