Belgium’s Red Devils advanced to the Round of 16 of the 2026 World Cup with a dramatic 3–2 extra-time victory over Senegal in Seattle on July 1st, wearing a jersey designed as an explicit homage to Belgian Surrealist artist René Magritte.
Created in partnership with Adidas, the shirt features a robin’s egg blue base color and a pattern of repeated pink and blue soccer balls, evoking Magritte’s recurring motif of round shapes such as apples, moons, and suns, which feature in his most celebrated works. Small horizontal lines throughout the print are a further nod to the game itself, representing the lines of a soccer pitch. The most direct reference to Magritte appears at the collar, where subtle script reads Ceci n’est pas un maillot (“This is not a jersey”), a direct homage to his 1928–29 painting The Treachery of Images, in which a painted pipe sits beneath the words Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
Magritte, who was born in 1898 and died in 1967, spent much of his career in Brussels, producing works that subverted the relationship between image, language, and reality. His preoccupation with the afternoon and evening sky—a signature blue featured in many of his canvases—is widely seen as the source of the jersey’s dominant tone.
This is the fourth time Belgium has used its away kit to celebrate an element of national culture. Previous editions honored the country’s cycling heritage at the 2016 European Championship, the Belgian music festival Tomorrowland at the 2022 World Cup, and the cartoonist Hergé’s Tintin at Euro 2024.
The Royal Belgian Football Association described the design as one that “sparks the imagination and invites conversation.” Authentic versions are available through Adidas for $150. Belgium will play the U.S. in the Round of 16 on Tuesday, July 7th.
