How Sports Murals are Drawing World Cup Fever

The Beautiful Game on the World's Walls: Street Art, Sport, and IP at the 2026 FIFA World Cup

*World IP Day Special Feature*

Sport is one of the most persistent and globally distributed subjects in contemporary street art. From cycling murals in Breton villages to basketball portraits across Cleveland and Los Angeles, from swimmers mid-stroke in Australia to wrestlers dominating New York's industrial neighbourhoods, sport gives street artists a shared visual language that travels as freely as the athletes themselves.

Football in particular has always found its truest expression beyond the stadium. Long before the last whistle, the beautiful game takes shape on a different kind of pitch: the walls, underpasses, and alleyways of cities worldwide. As the 2026 FIFA World Cup — the first co-hosted across three nations, the United States, Canada, and Mexico — draws closer, street artists on every continent are already warming up their spray cans.

Walk through Naples and Maradona watches over you from a dozen walls. In Buenos Aires, Messi's face peers from building facades. In St Paul, Minnesota, US footballer Megan Rapinoe was reportedly moved to tears on seeing the mural created in her honour. In Liverpool, a towering portrait of Jürgen Klopp — rendered in warm reds and golds — reflects a city's love affair with a manager who became a legend.

Athletes with the most street art murals in the world

1. Lionel Messi

New data and analysis by WIPO shows Lionel Messi  leading with most pieces documented across countries, from Rosario to Barcelona to Miami.

2. Diego Maradona

Diego Maradona ranks second place globally, his street art legacy exploding after his death in 2020, with Naples alone counting over a dozen major tributes.

3. Cristiano Ronaldo

Cristiano Ronaldo completes the podium, with most murals concentrated in Portugal and spreading to Manchester and Turin.

4. Kobe Bryant

Kobe Bryant leads street art's basketball category with murals across Los Angeles and Southern California, but also in Kiulap or Valencia.

Women athletes’ murals

At the same time, women players such as Mapi Leon, Millie Bright, Vivianne Miedema and Wendie Renard, are among the players and athletes increasingly featured on walls and brand campaigns around the world.

Serena Williams and Simone Biles have inspired documented pieces on multiple continents, reflecting street art's growing, though still underrepresented, engagement with women in sport.

World-Cup themed football murals

The 2026 World Cup traverses some of the world's most vibrant street art cities. WIPO data places Los Angeles (2,337 documented pieces) and New York (1,620) among the global top ten. Mexico City, host of the iconic opening match, carries a mural tradition stretching back to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, making it perhaps the city where large-format public art is most deeply embedded in civic culture.

World Cup-themed pieces are already appearing. Organized through Mexico’s Youth Institute, thousands of new murals are being painted on abandoned walls, schools, and soccer fields nationwide as young artists reclaim public spaces across Mexico with colorful images celebrating football, community, and national pride. In Los Angeles, an unofficial piece depicting the SoFi Stadium, site of the final, appeared overnight on a wall in Inglewood, already photographed by thousands.

That is street art doing what it always does: faster than any official campaign, more emotionally resonant than any corporate poster.

Can artists use sports insignia and famous athletes in sports murals?

The relationship between sport, street art, and intellectual property is as layered as any well-painted wall. FIFA's brand portfolio is one of the most protected in world sport. When artists paint unofficial tributes incorporating team crests or tournament branding, they might enter a grey zone that IP law has only partially mapped. Another WIPO story explores legal questions around urban creativity.

An athlete's mural is simultaneously a creative work in which the artist holds copyright, a potential use of a public figure's likeness requiring consent under image rights law, and possibly a trademark issue where club badges appear.

Artificial intelligence as a new player for creating sports art

In contrast, imagine a hypothetical image of rising Barcelona star Lamine Yamal which is not painted by human hands. It is generated by artificial intelligence, trained on vast datasets almost certainly including photographs of street art, football imagery, and the visual vocabulary of Pop Art. No spray can was lifted. No wall was touched. And yet: who owns this image? Can copyright attach to it? What rights does Yamal hold over an AI-generated depiction of his likeness? And what about the photographers/hunters and street artists whose styles and training data informed this piece?

These are live, commercially significant questions. WIPO economic research examines whether AI outputs qualify for copyright protection and how authorship might be attributed in human-machine creative processes. Equally pressing is the athlete's digital likeness. As AI generates ever more convincing replicas of famous individuals, current image rights frameworks face serious new stress tests. Other WIPO research on digital replica protection examines precisely these gaps — and what protections may be needed to safeguard athletes from unconsented AI replication at scale.

From the hand-sprayed walls of Naples to AI supported output trained on millions of images, the question of who owns and exploits both street artworks and athletes' iconic images has never been more urgent. The 2026 World Cup kicks off. The walls are already talking.