15 football treasures to celebrate the start of the 2026 FIFA World Cup

The 23rd edition of the FIFA World Cup, the planet’s largest sporting event, kicks off on Thursday 11 June. The tournament is being held jointly across the United States, Canada and Mexico, and will run for more than a month, until mid-July.

As the world comes together to celebrate the beautiful game, we look back at 15 football-related items that have scored in Christie’s salerooms. These include paintings and sculptures by the likes of Picasso and Warhol, as well as medals, football shirts and an immersive AI artwork inspired by Lionel Messi.

L.S. Lowry is renowned for his paintings of the industrial north of England, created in the first half of the 20th century. These scenes captured working activity around factories during the week, and recreational activity — notably, the attending of sports matches — at the weekend.

The Football Match (1949) offers a bird’s-eye cityscape filled with industrial buildings and houses. Lowry focuses our particular attention on a football game being played before a large, excited crowd.

The Brazil side that won the 1970 World Cup is regarded as one of the finest football teams in history. They won all six of their matches, scoring 19 goals and playing in a dazzlingly creative style.

The team’s star was arguably the greatest footballer of all time, Pelé, who scored the first goal in Brazil’s 4-1 win against Italy in the final. The iconic yellow top he wore that day, complete with the number ‘10’ embroidered in green on the back, came to auction in 2002.

After the Second World War, Pablo Picasso embraced what was for him a new medium: ceramics. Relocating from Paris to the south of France, he worked prodigiously out of a workshop called Madoura, in the town of Vallauris.

Renowned for their joie de vivre, the ceramics he made there ranged from plates, jugs and vases to standalone sculptures such as Footballeur (1965). This semi-abstract work is suggestive of a footballer lifting his leg, about to kick a ball.

France lost 1-0 to Sweden in a 1952 international football friendly in Paris. The match itself wasn’t memorable, but it would inspire a remarkable series of paintings by Nicolas de Staël, who watched that night from the stands.

His largest work — the monumental Parc des Princes (Les grands footballeurs) (1952), measuring three and a half metres long by two metres wide — stages a confrontation of coloured masses. The players are schematised into a set of dynamically interlocking quadrilaterals, the result being a frieze-like spectacular, hovering somewhere between the abstract and the figurative. Sold at Christie’s in 2019, it became the most expensive football painting in history.

Refik Anadol is famed for the use of AI in his art. In 2025, he created a piece inspired by the goal which football star Lionel Messi claims was the favourite of his career — a header scored for FC Barcelona in 2009, in the team’s 2-0 Champions League final win against Manchester United.

Anadol hypnotically reimagined that goal as an AI artwork. It amounts to an eight-minute experience which, in his words, attempts to convey ‘what Messi felt and what the crowd felt’.

This is a print of a monumental photographic work that was intended for installation in a (never realised) sports stadium in southwest Moscow. Created by the Soviet Jewish artist, El Lissitzky, in 1926, it depicts a dramatic moment in a football game in which various players jockey for the ball. A central figure hovers almost preternaturally above the rest.

The aim of Footballer was to inspire Soviet workers to participate in organised physical activities, thus boosting their health and productivity.

Born in the British city of Birmingham to first generation Jamaican immigrants, Hurvin Anderson based his painting Ball Watching IV (2003) on a childhood photograph. It depicts the artist and his friends during a moment’s pause in a game of football: their ball has been kicked into a pond, and they consider how to extract it.

The youths’ uncertainty about how to proceed is interpreted by some as a metaphor for the liminal status of Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the United Kingdom.

The Spanish artist Joan Miró was 89 when his country hosted the FIFA World Cup in 1982. The tournament allowed Spain’s democratic government — newly restored after the death of dictator Francisco Franco — to showcase to the world a modern, happy, pluralistic society.

Miró accepted an invitation to design an official World Cup poster. Like so many of his previous works, it’s joyful, colourful and semi-abstract (albeit with enough football references for those looking hard enough, such as the corner of a pitch in the bottom right).

At the start of his career in the 1980s, Jeff Koons found inspiration in sport: the most famous result being his ‘Equilibrium’ series, in which he suspended basketballs in tanks of water.

In Soccerball (Bumblebee) (1985), he presented another piece of sporting material in an unexpected way. It consists of a football which looks so light and full of air that one assumes it’s real. In actual fact, it is a replica ball made of bronze — which no player would be advised to kick.

In 1977, Andy Warhol worked on a new series called ‘Athletes’. It featured silkscreen paintings of 10 sports stars, including the boxer Muhammad Ali, the tennis player Chris Evert and the Brazilian football great Pelé.

Long fascinated by the concept of celebrity, Warhol saw these works as natural successors to the silkscreens he had done of the likes of Marilyn Monroe and Marlon Brando in the 1960s. Thanks to rapid advances in television sports broadcasting, sport stars were now starting to match the fame of other entertainers.

Born in southern Italy in 1880, the artist Umberto Boccioni settled in Milan in his twenties and became one of the key figures associated with Futurism.

In Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1913) — a painting in MoMA’s collection in New York, a study for which was offered at Christie’s — successive movements are captured on a single canvas. Boccioni synthesised time, place, and matter, his subject (a football player) seeming almost to dematerialise in the process.

The Australian artist Jeffrey Smart was renowned for scenes featuring lonely figures in ambiguous urban spaces. Football Field, Soller was inspired by a visit he made in the summer of 1965 to the town of Sóller, on the Spanish island Mallorca.

It is far from obvious where the eponymous football field can be found — perhaps on the other side of an individual who looks curiously at us from under an umbrella, and who sits in what might be the stand of a small stadium.

The first FIFA World Cup was held in Uruguay in July 1930. Thirteen teams took part, with the host nation emerging victorious, after defeating their neighbours Argentina 4-2 in the final. The player of the tournament was Jose Leandro Andrade, the son of a former slave who went by the nickname of ‘The Black Marvel’.

Andrade played in all of Uruguay’s matches. The gold World Cup winner’s medal awarded to him after the final came to auction in 2005.

On 22 December 2020, Lionel Messi broke one of football’s greatest records: by scoring the most goals for a single club. He netted his 644th for FC Barcelona, in a La Liga (Spanish league) match against Real Valladolid.

The pair of Adidas boots he wore to score that goal were later signed and donated by Messi, and offered in a charity auction to raise money for a Barcelona hospital.

André Kertész was a pioneer of snapshot photography, capturing subjects on the streets of interwar Paris who were unaware of his attention. He benefitted from the recent invention of the hand-held Leica camera: Photographers were now able to roam freely, no longer hampered by unwieldy tripods and large-format cameras.

Kertész was also a master of composition. In this image, he produced a remarkable play of shadows created chiefly by a tree and a child kicking a football.