In football-mad Spain, the beautiful game spills off the playing field and into the bars and clubs. In villages and neighbourhoods where a less digital lifestyle endures, the football (or ‘foosball') table is a standard feature. The players are often painted in local team kits, and hours are spent tilting, kicking and shooting a tiny ball, with goals clocked up via rounded discs on the tabletop.
RS Barcelona is a family-run metalworking company dedicated to the art of play. Founded in 1975 in a small workshop on the city's outskirts, it began by cutting and folding aluminium sheet components for others. When brothers Rafael and Sergio Rodríguez took the helm from their father, the company gradually made its way into the world of design, creating a collection of football tables that cleverly elevate them with the use of colour, clean lines and contemporary references.
‘I'm a trained mechanic,' says Rafael, ‘but because our clients came to us with sketches and basically just said, “you figure it out”, I learnt how to design in aluminium industrially.' This did not go unnoticed by Fernando Amat, owner of the legendary (and now sadly closed) Barcelona design emporium Vinçon, who championed the ‘RS2' football table in his shop window. In 2011, the company released ‘Ella', a table featuring female players, some time before the women's game gained the respect it deserves. But its catalogue, which includes ping-pong and pool tables, really took off with the rise of co-working spaces and Silicon Valley workplaces promoting the benefits of downtime and staff bonding, when customised ‘RS' game tables could be found on some of the world's leading digital campuses, including Google and eBay.
Today, RS Barcelona operates from much larger premises in the Catalan countryside, where the company manages almost the entire production process, from cutting and moulding to assembly and powder coating. In 2022, Rafael approached Spanish designer Jaime Hayon about a collaboration. ‘I had always been a huge admirer of his work, and I thought a football table designed by him could really shine,' he says. But while game tables seem like a natural fit for Hayon's playful design language, Rafael claims he took a bit of convincing (although his team didn't). ‘In 2024, I took one of our tables to Jaime's studio in Valencia and his whole team just kind of jumped up and started coming up with ideas.'
‘RS Capsule' – or, in Hayon's own words, ‘the Ferrari of football tables' – was born of this encounter. ‘I loved the thought of having my own sculptures playing football,' he says. ‘I found that quite fantastic. But I also wanted the table to be an incredible piece of design: something super elegant, luxurious, magnificent, with amazing industrial quality. For me, this was the magic of the project. To make something that could be a sculpture in your living room, but suddenly you can play football with it! How wonderful is that?'
Realising Hayon's vision presented RS Barcelona with one of its most complex challenges to date, particularly when it came to the table's curvaceous form, which was very difficult to achieve in sheet aluminium. In this respect, the development of ‘RS Capsule' shared similarities with automotive design and production. Nearly every component, from the robust, column-like legs to the complex internal mechanisms, was tested, prototyped, retested and produced in the factory. Although aluminium is the principal material, various techniques were required, leaving an uneven surface that had to be repolished for consistency before the table was sent for powder coating in warm, woody beige with anodised chrome rods and detailing. An all-over glossy anodised aluminium version is currently under development.
‘I tried different ideas [for the players], but I was very attracted to this strange little chicken!’
Jaime Hayon
There are two types of football table ‘players': those with two legs and those whose legs are joined into a ‘peg' – a variation that aficionados say alters the strategy of the game and the way they play their shots. For ‘RS Capsule', the players are a cast aluminium, two-legged, 13.5cm-high version of Hayon's signature ‘Chicken' – a madcap little personage that has appeared throughout his diverse repertoire of materials, from ceramics to paintings and large-format sculptures. ‘I tried different ideas [for the players], but I was very attracted to this strange little chicken! I love the shoes,' says the designer. ‘They are a little elevated, almost Japanese in a way, and then you have this humanised chicken with wings, standing there, playing football!' Hayon has always loved table football. ‘I used to play when I was a kid in Madrid, so it brings back very nice memories,' he says. ‘[With this project] I discovered how incredibly technical this game actually is. The ball needs to have exactly the right weight; the panels need to rebound in a very specific way, and the table needs to be super stable because people are moving and playing with quite a lot of energy.'
RS Barcelona has forged an important niche by creating memorable moments of play through beautiful design and interactive experiences. ‘I think we need [analogue games] more than ever,' says Hayon. ‘We spend so much time with screens, phones, computers... and sometimes we forget how wonderful it is to simply be together, playing, laughing, imagining!'