Lionel Messi To Reveal His All-Time Favorite Soccer Goal With An A.I. Artwork
The soccer superstar’s favorite sporting moment will be revealed by Turkish artist Refik Anadol’s abstract digital artwork in June.
Argentinian soccer icon Lionel Messi is putting an end to the debate this week, declaring once and for all his favorite of the 800-plus goals he’s scored these past 22 years for club teams FC Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, or Inter Miami CF—and, of course, Argentina’s national team. To celebrate, the noted Instagram superstar and fifth-highest-earning athlete of 2025 has joined forces with decorated Turkish artist Refik Anadol. Together, Messi and Anadol are dropping a new, collaborative artwork that transforms a photo of Messi’s favorite goal into one of Anadol’s mesmerizing, if divisive, digital abstractions. Christie’s will unveil the piece at their New York headquarters on June 11 and sell it on July 25 to benefit A Goal for Life, an educational initiative by the Inter Miami CF Foundation, with UNICEF.
Listicles, YouTube videos, and Reddit threads attempting to rank Messi’s most important scores abound. Choosing the winner for himself was “very difficult,” Messi admitted in a release. “Each one is special in its own way, and some are really important or bring back incredible memories.”
Perhaps you’re wondering whether Messi is friends with Anadol—who’s a pretty affable guy, according to my sources. Alas, the two stars aren’t best buds. At least they weren’t before this project. Miami-based Argentine curator Ximena Caminos—currently Chief Creative Officer at the very ritzy Faena Group—brought Anadol on board to oversee this latest creative Messi tribute. Anadol is one of those rare artists who’s breached the insular art world to find mainstream fame. He’s been working with AI since 2016, when he became the first-ever resident at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence (AMI) program. Since then, Anadol has paved a lane for himself with his “Machine Hallucinations” series. Here, Anadol and his LA-based studio team feed proprietary algorithms massive, project-specific data sets. Those algorithms then render that data visually—sometimes as flowers or coral, but more often as hypnotic, rippling seas of color.
“For as long as I can remember, I have imagined data as more than just information,” Anadol said this year. “I have seen it as a living, breathing material, a pigment with infinite possibilities.”
Some critics have compared his “Machine Hallucinations” to screensavers or accused Anadol of using art to gloss over AI’s more insidious possibilities. One thing’s for sure though—these works are pretty, and people know it. When Anadol showed “Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA” on a massive screen at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2022, 3 million guests watched it for 38 minutes on average—far longer than most paintings ever get. MoMA acquired the work soon after its run ended in 2023, marking their first AI acquisition.
Anadol’s work with Messi will interpret “the purest visual representation of the goal chosen by Messi” according to “the millions of data points linked to that moment.” Details remain under lock and key, but representatives told Maxim that the artwork will mesh with Anadol’s wider oeuvre. Thus, the big announcement of Messi’s favorite goal on Inter Miami CF’s social media May 22 at 11 a.m. EST will really just be the start of the surprise—and the sale, its grand conclusion.