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 works, which is reflected in the robin’s egg base color of the jersey. Dozens of his pieces explore mirrored or repeated shapes—especially round ones like the apple, moon, or sun—which, in the jersey design, is reimagined as a series of pink and blue soccer balls. According to a description from the Royal Belgian Football Association, the small horizontal lines throughout the pattern reflect the bounds of a soccer pitch. While most countries tend to return to simple, color-blocked reinterpretations of their national colors for World Cup jerseys, it’s not unheard of for teams to take a more outside-the-box approach. This year, for example, Ghana’s home jersey takes inspiration from kente, a traditional hand-woven textile, and France’s away jersey is inspired by the color of the Statue of Liberty. Other teams have pulled pointers from jerseys of World Cups past, including Uruguay with its 1930s-inspired away jersey and the U.S. with its home “stripes” kit, inspired by a 2012 look that was likened to the book series Where’s Waldo? Compared with these designs, many of which still rely on a color palette pulled from national flags, Belgium’s look is fairly daring. Instead of directly duping Magritte’s work, Adidas’s reimagining tastefully remixes it into a modern, bright print—and it’s seeming likely that the Red Devils will be one of the best-dressed teams on the field.