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.

The bromance between these two🥹😅

Haaland🤝Bellingham pic.twitter.com/tsEZ5moWVQ

— BBC Sport (@BBCSport) July 12, 2026

“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.

Napoleon, by Emanuel Bachrach-Barée, early 20th century pic.twitter.com/TTXwgIJhMu

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) July 10, 2026

“(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.

St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, by Lorenzo Ghiberti, 1400-05, 📸 by Buda Mendes pic.twitter.com/7XWdl4SFGR

— ArtButMakeItSports (@ArtButSports) July 5, 2026

“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.”

It was a passing comment from Liverpool’s new head coach during their pre-season tour to the United States, but one that spoke to a defining theme of football history: a nation’s cultural norms can shape the way it plays the game.

“People often ask why a lot of Basque managers especially have arrived at this level, and why a lot of Spanish teams are winning a lot of things,” Andoni Iraola said in July.

“I always say that a sense of collectiveness is very important.

“Spain has never had the best athletes. If you analyse, in swimming, track and field, they don’t normally win medals. But in collective sports, they are very good. In football, basketball, handball, hockey — we always put the team first.

“An example is someone like Rodri. He didn’t score or make an assist, but at the end, they won the World Cup, and he won best player of the tournament. ‘Team-first’ was always integrated in how we’re raised.”

Spain has shaped the way football has been played in the 21st century — from Pep Guardiola’s paradigm-shifting possession-based style at Barcelona, Bayern Munich and Manchester City to the dominance of the national team from 2008 to 2012, when they won two European Championship titles either side of their first World Cup.

Yes, star players shone in each of those sides, but Iraola’s point remains pertinent. Spain’s defining strength has long been the collective, with individuals thriving within a wider framework rather than carrying the burden alone.

Spain celebrate winning their first World Cup in 2010 (Ryan Pierse – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)

This summer served as a reminder of Spanish dominance as Luis de la Fuente’s side lifted the World Cup, two years on from winning another Euros, with an approach that was not dissimilar to that which brought success with their previous golden generation. Their women are current world champions, too.

Spain’s superpower was a coherent tactical system that no other national team — or their respective talismans — could find an answer to.

At club level, Paris Saint-Germain became back-to-back Champions League winners in May, thanks to Spanish coach Luis Enrique’s fluid attacking style, packed with rotations and a cohesive network of players.

It is no coincidence their European success has come for PSG after star forward Kylian Mbappe, a player who thrives off individual accolades as much as collective success, left for Real Madrid in summer 2024.

The club PSG beat in this year’s final were Arsenal, led by Mikel Arteta, who days earlier became just the second Spanish manager after Guardiola to win a Premier League title.

A strong defensive foundation was at the heart of Arteta’s success, but their victorious season saw them share the attacking load across 18 different goalscorers — their most since he was appointed in December 2019. Summer signing Viktor Gyokeres was their most prolific player with 14 goals in the top flight, the second-lowest leading-scorer total of any Premier League champions since 2000.

Mikel Arteta’s Premier League champions Arsenal spread the attacking load across the team (Michael Regan/Getty Images For Premier League)

The Europa League champions last season? That would be Arsenal’s fellow Premier League side Aston Villa, led by another meticulous Spanish manager in Unai Emery. Amazingly, all three are from the Basque province of Guipuzcoa, population 750,000, in northern Spain.

Each of those teams had a co-operative effort woven into their style by their head coach or manager.

Iraola’s perspective on the cultural importance of football will be music to the ears of Liverpool fans, who have consistently used the sport as a shield to fight against political, social or financial adversity throughout the club’s history — an approach that reflects the values of the Merseyside city as a whole.

“Things work in general when we aren’t just selfish, when we prioritise the situations of those who have less. That happens as well in football,” Iraola said.

“The ones who don’t play, the ones who come from the academy, the ones who earn less, it’s a reference if you want to compare it with society.”

Football can shape the culture within a city, region or country, but the relationship works in both directions.

As Iraola implies, society impacts football as much as the game impacts society.

Expanding on Iraola’s comments, there are methods to measure how different countries integrate individuals into groups. One method is to look at the sociological differences between ‘individualism’ and ‘collectivism’.

Individualist societies typically focus on independence within social groups, encouraging personal expression, and are more accepting of differences — and are typically found in Western countries, according to studies.

By contrast, collectivist societies focus more on social harmony and prioritise the group over individual goals, with decisions made based on what is best for the wider community. These have been found to typically be most prevalent among African and South Asian nations.

The research on this topic is extensive and widely debated, but a 2026 study has re-modelled a global individualism-collectivism scale to measure where each country falls.

Across a sample of 102 nations, Nordic ones (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland) come out as the most individualist. Spain’s index score still falls within the upper echelons of an individualist culture, but is lower than some of its fellow major footballing nations, including France, Germany, Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) and the Netherlands.

If cultural norms do shape footballing identities, that gap may help explain why the Spanish game has historically placed a greater premium on collective structures than some of its European neighbours.

How much these psychosocial factors directly correlate with on-pitch success remains unclear, but this would not be the first time cultural links are made between football and national identity.

In England, Scott Murray’s playful article in the first edition of magazine The Blizzard, titled How Roy Race Ruined English Football, highlighted how much the comic book Roy of the Rovers has created an unrealistic expectation of national identity that relies on the heroic acts of an individual rather than wider teamwork or tactical systems.

The comic was first published in the 1950s, but the emphasis on last-gasp winners and talismanic performances continued until the mid-1990s — with narratives that cascaded through English football culture in the decades in between.

How often have the hopes of the nation fallen on the shoulders of Kevin Keegan, Paul Gascoigne, David Beckham, Wayne Rooney or Harry Kane? Each generation has had a star individual who rose above the collective, with Jude Bellingham seemingly the next in line after his starring role at this year’s World Cup.

That individualist approach tallies with comments by former England captain Steven Gerrard’s last year. He told ex-England team-mate Rio Ferdinand’s podcast that the so-called ‘Golden generation’ of talented English players in the mid-2000s, which they were both part of, were “all egotistical losers”.

“It was down to the culture within England,” Gerrard said. “We weren’t friendly or connected. We weren’t a team. We never, at any stage, became a really good, strong team.”

Steven Gerrard said England’s ‘Golden generation’ at the start of this century were not a ‘friendly or connected’ unit (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

The failures of England’s previous generations were multi-faceted, but how much did the national culture feed into the acceptance of their behaviour? Gareth Southgate’s recent success as England coach was made even more impressive by the way he curated a squad made up of rival players at club level who worked together in harmony for the national team.

With the help of team psychologist Dr Pippa Grange, England cultivated a team ethos in a manner that was incongruous to generations before them — and felt somewhat jarring, based on English societal norms.

In the Netherlands, David Winner’s excellent book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football reflects the deeply-rooted societal influence towards the style that was synonymous with ‘Total Football’ from that country’s sides in the 1960s and 1970s.

Beyond historical and political analogies, Winner makes a fascinating link between architecture and football in the Netherlands — in which its flat landscape and crowded cities meant the optimisation of space and appreciation of geometry became an inherently Dutch trait.

It was that same appreciation of geometry that became the foundation of the Netherlands’ on-pitch success, pioneered by coach Rinus Michels and player Johan Cruyff.

While it is difficult to accurately measure its direct impact, football can often act as a mirror held up to reflect society.

The culture a manager grows up in can inevitably shape their ideas, and that becomes particularly intriguing when they take those principles to a new club or national team.

Going full circle back to Liverpool, Mohamed Salah’s summer exit means there is a gap in their squad for a new star of the show — but maybe they do not need a single individual leading the way to find new success. Team-first, as Iraola says.

If he brings the same values of his Basque and Spanish roots to Anfield, there is every reason to believe Liverpool’s new head coach will have similar success to his fellow countrymen.

As Cristian Romero pulls on the famous red shirt, he hums the words to North London Forever before making his way into the tunnel at the Emirates Stadium.

As the team walk out onto the pitch, Romero high-fives mascot Gunnersaurus, who points to the Argentinian’s brand new ‘Once a Gooner, always a Gooner’ tattoo on his right calf and gives a thumbs up.

Unlikely? FantasyLand? Well, if Arsenal pursue their surprise interest in the 28-year-old centre-back, perhaps not.

Not that Tottenham Hotspur appear willing to consider an approach from their neighbours and bitter rivals for their captain, let alone sanction a sale.

He may have been born in Cordoba, northern Argentina, but after five years at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the notion of Romero being allowed to head the four miles south to the Emirates feels extremely problematic at best, sacrilegious at worst.

And yet, it wouldn’t even be the most controversial transfer in the history of the Arsenal-Spurs rivalry, let alone English football and certainly not globally. It would, though, add to the list of highly-disputed mooted moves that never happened.

“I was asking myself why he’d choose Arsenal when you know how much it’s going to affect your personal life,” ex-Spurs defender Stephen Clemence previously told The Athletic. “That’s what surprised me most about his decision. You turn your whole life upside down with a move like that.”

Sol Campbell was heading towards Tottenham-legend territory. Born a 30-minute drive from White Hart Lane in the Plaistow district of east London, academy graduate Campbell was still a teenager when he made his first-team debut for Spurs and would blossom into one of the Premier League’s best defenders, an England regular, their captain who lifted the League Cup in 1999 and a player who made more than 300 appearances for them.

Then, aged 26, he left on a free transfer to further his career ambitions. Disappointing, yes, but understandable. Inter of Italy and Spain’s Barcelona were possible destinations, but instead Campbell shocked English football and caused unimaginable consternation and fury… by joining Arsenal.

Spurs fans took this very, very well.

They hung an effigy of Campbell from a lamppost on Tottenham High Road, flooded their stadium with ‘Judas’ banners when he returned as an Arsenal player, threw drink bottles and missiles in his direction and endlessly chanted ‘scum’, among many worse words. His new Arsenal team-mates had booed Campbell in training to prepare him for the reception but, well, nothing could quite compare to the abuse he took.

Tottenham fans direct their anger at Sol Campbell in November 2001 (Tom Jenkins/Getty Images)

“In hindsight, I’m not sure if I would sign him again, bearing in mind the difficulties he faced,” Arsenal’s then manager Arsene Wenger later said.

It was the most controversial transfer in modern English football history, but one Campbell could justify via the two Premier League titles and three FA Cups he won in six seasons with Arsenal. “Spurs fans have not forgotten it, but it was the best thing I could have done for myself,” Campbell said.

Fellow defender William Gallas may have gone in the opposite direction to Tottenham (also on a free) a few years later, but nothing has compared to Campbell’s move since.

Imagine Bruno Guimaraes ditching this week’s Arsenal move to join Sunderland from Newcastle United instead, or Erling Haaland swapping Manchester City for neighbours United and you’d have something comparable.

The latter switch is not without precedent, though.

Carlos Tevez sort-of swapped Old Trafford for the Etihad Stadium in 2009; he had won two Premier League titles in two seasons having been loaned to United for two years from West Ham but, having elected not to join the club permanently that summer (despite United wanting to sign him), he instead went to City.

This was before their dominance era, so the old noisy neighbours wanted to make a big song and dance out of the deal and erected a huge ‘Welcome to Manchester’ billboard to reflect what would soon be a changing of the guard in the city.

Manchester City’s ‘Welcome to Manchester’ billboard after signing Carlos Tevez angered Sir Alex Ferguson (Dave Thompson/PA Images via Getty Images)

It was a marketing idea laced with genius, although United manager Sir Alex Ferguson didn’t quite see it that way, calling the stunt “stupid and arrogant”.

The Manchester rivalry is fairly hate-filled, so Wayne Rooney’s dalliance with City when he submitted a transfer request at United in 2010 was pretty controversial, ditto Cristiano Ronaldo’s flirtation with the Etihad in 2021 before he returned to Old Trafford after more than a decade with Real Madrid and Juventus. But it’s nothing compared with United’s rivalry with Liverpool.

Players swapping one of those clubs for the other is almost unheard of, to the extent that it has not happened since 1964, when Phil Chisnall moved to Anfield for £25,000 ($34,000) when the rivalry was devoid of the intensity that fills it now.

Even playing for both clubs in a career is rare, with only two men doing it in the Premier League era: Paul Ince (in 1997, two years after leaving United for Inter) and Michael Owen, with the latter seen by many Liverpool fans as a traitor for moving to Old Trafford in 2009, five years after leaving Anfield for Real Madrid.

Only one player has come close to leaving one for the other in modern times, although given United’s staunch opposition to the mooted deal, it perhaps never came that close at all.

Defender Gabriel Heinze wanted to leave in 2007, having lost his place in the team to Patrice Evra. Liverpool were his preferred destination and submitted a bid of £6.8million, which they believed met a minimum-fee release clause.

But United rejected it, and the dispute became bitter. Heinze believed the offer should legally have been accepted, so it went all the way to a Premier League tribunal, which ruled in United’s favour. Heinze never played for them again, eventually joining Real Madrid that same summer.

The Argentina international defender, now a coach at Arsenal, came to regret the saga. He said in 2011: “I was aware of the rivalry, I knew the risk of going from Manchester to Liverpool and what it means. I hope it doesn’t tarnish the way they (supporters) see me and they will remember the three years I had in the team.”

Given how unpopular United are with many other fanbases, moving there can destroy a legacy, like when Robin van Persie joined from Arsenal in 2012, or Alan Smith, who was Leeds United through and through before he broke Yorkshire hearts when signing for the team they despise like no other in 2004.

Steven Gerrard had his Liverpool legacy and connection in mind when he rebuffed Chelsea in 2005 after a long, protracted dalliance with the best team in England at the time, albeit he had just won the Champions League under Rafael Benitez.

“I’d have regretted it for the rest of my life,” Gerrard said recently of moving to Stamford Bridge.

“I went to see my dad and my brother, who are two Liverpool fans, and they completely took all the external out of it and just said, ‘If you go and win two or three Premier Leagues, or a European Cup, with Chelsea or Inter Milan, or Real Madrid, will it be good?’

“And I went, ‘Yeah, of course it will be good, because you’ve won’. They said, ‘But will it be good or better than if you win one more trophy with Liverpool?’ And I said, ‘No, I’d feel better to do it with Liverpool’. They said, ‘Well, just make it all go away’. And it all went away.”

Transfers just do not happen between certain clubs, like Glasgow’s big two Celtic and Rangers, for example, given their deep-seated rivalry which encompasses far more than football.

Rangers famously had an unwritten policy against signing Catholic players, which was smashed in 1989 when former Celtic striker Mo Johnston joined from French club Nantes. It was hugely controversial.

Johnston’s agent Bill McMurdo later said: “After the signing, Maurice and I had security with us 24 hours a day. I had people stay in my house for six months, and Maurice had a minder with him all the time.”

It takes an audacious player to sign for both Celtic and Rangers during their whole career, with Kenny Miller and Steven Pressley among a very small post-Second World War number to have done it.

It’s a similar story with Barcelona and Real Madrid in Spain. Only a handful have moved directly between the clubs in the past 50 years, such as Argentine striker Javier Saviola in 2007 (he joined Madrid on a free transfer after his Barca contract expired) and Spain midfielder (and now Paris Saint-Germain head coach) Luis Enrique, who went the other way in the same circumstances in 1996.

By far the most prominent and hate-filled such transfer was when Luis Figo made a then-world-record £37million move to Madrid in 2000. The Portuguese forward had won La Liga with Barca in 1998 and 1999, but that was not enough to stop him ditching the Camp Nou for the Bernabeu, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake.

Missiles rain down on Luis Figo at the Camp Nou in November 2002 (Firo Foto/Getty Images)

When he returned to Camp Nou in a Madrid shirt, glass whisky bottles were thrown onto the pitch by angry fans, and every time Figo took a corner, the game had to be halted due to the barrage of missiles hurled in his direction.

“When we warmed up and saw that atmosphere, I’d have been happy if the referee decided to call off the game,” then Madrid full-back Roberto Carlos said.

It got worse two years later, when a pig’s head was thrown at Figo during a Barca-Madrid match.

Romero may or may not have it that bad at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium as an Arsenal player if he makes this move, but it might be wise not to find out.