Belgium’s World Cup Jersey Turns Magritte Into a Pitch-Side Reference
Belgium’s latest World Cup kit is doing more than signaling team colors. After a 3–2 extra-time victory over Senegal in Seattle on July 1, the Red Devils advanced to the Round of 16 wearing a jersey created with Adidas as an explicit tribute to Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898–1967).
The shirt’s robin’s egg blue ground and repeated pink and blue soccer balls evoke the artist’s recurring use of rounded forms — apples, moons, suns — while thin horizontal lines across the print suggest the markings of a soccer field. The most pointed reference appears at the collar, where the phrase “Ceci n’est pas un maillot” echoes Magritte’s 1928–29 painting The Treachery of Images, in which a pipe is paired with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”
Magritte spent much of his career in Brussels and built a body of work that unsettled the relationship between image, language, and reality. His fascination with the sky, especially its muted afternoon and evening blues, also seems to inform the jersey’s dominant tone, giving the kit a cool, almost dreamlike clarity.
The Royal Belgian Football Association said the design is intended to “spark the imagination and invite conversation.” It is the fourth time Belgium has used an away kit to reference national culture, following earlier nods to cycling at the 2016 European Championship, the Tomorrowland festival at the 2022 World Cup, and Hergé’s Tintin at Euro 2024.
Authentic versions of the jersey are available through Adidas for $150. Belgium will next face the U.S. in the Round of 16 on Tuesday, July 7th, extending a tournament run that now carries both sporting momentum and a distinctly Belgian visual signature.
