It was the undignified scrap that marred the World Cup final.
After Spain’s narrow 1-0 win following extra time last month, with coach Luis de la Fuente’s squad celebrating on the pitch, a series of scuffles ensued, leading FIFA to investigate Argentina player Leandro Paredes for three counts of assault and team-mate Nahuel Molina for two.
During the confrontation, Paredes put his right hand on opponent Gavi’s face, with one finger going into his mouth, as he shoved him to the ground. It was a moment that most would not consider any form of ‘art’.
Unless, of course, your name is LJ Rader.
The New Yorker has been linking art and sport since December 2019 on his social media accounts called Art But Make It Sport, building hundreds of thousands of followers.
He compared the flashpoint from the World Cup final with a zoomed-in version of Les Femmes Se Battent (‘women fighting’), a Louis-Leopold Boilly painting from 1818 that shows two ladies in a brawl as others try to break it up.
“The account becomes the most exciting during large-scale events. I put the World Cup up there with the Olympics,” says Rader, whose Instagram and X accounts grew 20 per cent in audience during the five-week tournament.
“What makes them unique is that you’re not just highlighting what happens on the pitch, you’re also highlighting the fans, the colours, the pageantry. There’s a lot of other things that are going on in addition to just the sport itself.”
Rader, who has written a book on his work, is most commonly found comparing moments in American sport to artwork.
While he has posted football/soccer comparisons before, this World Cup was his biggest yet, and he posted several times on the day of the final. Some commenters responded to his choices by calling him a genius.
Any sport is within his remit, though he tries to avoid both player injuries and the work of problematic artists.
During the World Cup’s quarter-final between England and Norway, an image of opponents Erling Haaland and Jude Bellingham embracing side-by-side with one of Gerard David’s painting Lamentation became Rader’s most-liked comparison.
He says he is conscious of the online discourse surrounding teams and players — in this case, he played up to the ‘bromance’ between Haaland and Bellingham.
“You try to keep them tasteful. You don’t want to do anything that doesn’t meet like a high editorial standard, but anytime there’s like additional layers that you can build into a post, it takes it to that next level.”
Another post compared Kylian Mbappe with a portrait of Napoleon by Emanuel Bachrach-Baree, as memes circulated online calling France’s striker and captain a dictator.
“(In soccer) you don’t get a ton of unique moments,” says Rader, a Tottenham Hotspur fan who also founded sports data company FanFlare Sports. “There’s only so much a soccer player can do with their body at any given moment, but at the World Cup you introduce various jersey colours, the fans and the storylines.”
His personal favourite find was seeing Untitled by Alma Thomas in a sea of Norway fans doing their famous en-masse ‘row’ movement in the stands during a match.
These comparisons do not come by accident.
Rader often visits art galleries and museums — the weekend before talking to The Athletic, he had gone to the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. “Every time I travel, I try to carve out the time to go see something new,” he says.
He told The Athletic in 2023 that his grandmother would take him to museums and that he almost majored in art history at university, before being talked out of it by his parents — instead choosing a degree in human and organisational development with a minor in corporate strategy.
Large chunks of his mind and camera roll, upwards of 15,000 photos, are made up of artworks ready to be linked to sporting moments.
“There are a bunch that I have memorised and know exactly what I want to post. Others take a little bit more thought, knowing it looks like a certain artistic style or theme and trying to find the right one,” he says.
“So this Paraguay vs France one, this player flying… there are lots of paintings of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata.
“I then know that Alma Thomas has symmetry, brush strokes, a similar colour palette, and then landing on the right painting has become the most gratifying, because it’s leveraging my knowledge as opposed to something I’ve just memorised.”
I tested him on the spot with a photo of Michael Skubala, who last season managed Lincoln City (my hometown club) to promotion from League One, the third tier of English football, doing a fist-pump to their fans. Skubala was quickly compared to a statue of Julius Caesar by Nicolas Coustou from the Garden of Versailles near Paris.
It was an apt comparison.
So, it’s not AI?
“AI is never going to be as good as me,” Rader says. “I’ve thrown some images in just to see what happens and it doesn’t come close.
“What my account does is it shows the power of the human brain and what we can be capable of when we study things and memorise things and have a joy for sports.”
