The first thing I had to do was remove the players and football and stadium from the image. I cropped out the stadium, Then using the clone and heal brush I removed the player shadows and divots, after that I used the pen tool to crop out each player, making a copy I used the expand selection and then deleted them with content aware delete. I repainted the lines and added some blur to them. recoloured the pitch, and added a blur for some DOF using a layer mask with a gradient and the lens blur filter.

I used these next steps for each player so I won't add them all here. First thing was to create the base, Used the circle marquee tool to create the top and bottom halves, filled them with green and white respectively. Dropped the halves onto each other using ctrl+E then selected the shape with ctrl+click on the layer. Created a new layer, filled with 50% grey, set blend mode to soft light and then I could dodge and burn over the top without destroying the original. Painted some shadows and hi-lights onto the shape. The shadows were done with the drop shadow brush, changed the opacity, then added a gradient and faded the shadows.

The steps used for the players were used in the same way for the football.