Adidas designed these World Cup jerseys for elite athletes—and clever art buffs

For the 2026 FIFA World Cup, Belgium’s Red Devils are bringing surrealism to the pitch. The team’s away jersey, designed in partnership with Adidas, is a blue and pink pattern based on the works of the Belgian artist René Magritte (1898-1967), whose mind-bending paintings helped define the surrealist movement. Authentic versions of the jerseys are on sale at Adidas for $150. This is the fourth time that Belgium has opted to honor some element of the country’s heritage through its away jersey design. At the 2016 UEFA European Championship, the athletes donned a jersey inspired by Belgium’s cycling culture; at the 2022 World Cup, they sported a design created in collaboration with the Belgian music festival Tomorrowland; and for the 2024 Euros, they pulled inspiration from Tintin, the iconic cartoon by the Belgian artist Hergé. In 2026, the team is putting its most high-design spin on the concept yet. [Photo: Adidas] ‘This is not a jersey’ When you think of Magritte, you likely picture a green apple, a bowler hat, and a pipe. While Magritte dabbled in cubism during the early years of his career, his most famous works—most of which were produced between the late 1920s and early ‘60s—blended realistic scenes with unexpected twists. Objects often appear where they shouldn’t be, as in the green apple superimposed atop the face of a well-dressed man in The Son of Man; or physics are abandoned, like the floating pedestrians in Golconda. [Photo: Adidas] The jersey directly calls out one famous work, The Treachery of Images, which shows a pipe captioned with the phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). On the neck of the jersey, a subtle script reads, “Ceci n’est pas un maillot” (“This is not a jersey”). René Magritte, The Treachery of Images, ca. 1928. Several common motifs emerge from Magritte’s portfolio and are taken up by the Belgium away jersey. His fixation on the afternoon and evening sky lends a blue hue to many of his wo