A data sculpture made by the media artist Refik Anadol in collaboration with the legendary footballer Lionel Messi has raised $1.87m for global educational charities at an online auction run by Christie's New York.
The artificial intelligence-powered sculpture, A Goal in Life: Leo Messi x Refik Anadol (2025), is a re-imagination, using millions of data points, of Messi's favourite goal—a header scored against Manchester United on 22 May 2009. It was a goal that more or less sealed victory for Barcelona in the UEFA Champions League final.
Messi, the Argentina and now Inter Miami star, chose the goal in May as his favourite of the 870 he had scored to date. The work was then open for public viewing—in a U-shaped installation on an eight-minute loop—for 10 days at Rockefeller Center, in midtown New York City, as part of the tenth Christie's Art+Tech Summit.
Proceeds from the sale will go to multiple nonprofits, including Inter Miami CF Foundation’s global partnership with Unicef. The partnership supports access to education programmes in five countries across Latin America and the Caribbean.
“Choosing just one goal out of them all is very difficult—each one is special in its own way, and some are really important or bring back incredible memories," Messi, regularly judged the greatest footballer of all time, said in a press statement in May. “But highlighting one as a favourite for the first time, to make this unique project possible is worth it. There's a strong purpose behind it, and I'm really happy to be part of it.”
“Messi and the Inter Miami CF Foundation were looking to do a beautiful philanthropic work,” Anadol told The Art Newspaper in May. “So he donated his best memory… to create his best memory data, his best memory emotions” to become a work of art.
Anadol’s recent data sculptures have been created in collaboration with the world’s leading natural history collections (as seen at Anadol's solo show at Serpentine Galleries in 2024); and with the archives of the architect Frank Gehry (Living Architecture: Gehry at the Guggenheim Bilbao). In each case the Anadol Studio, founded by Anadol and his wife and collaborator Efsun Erkeliç, source all data for training an AI model with the originator's full permission, and to show the process used in building that model.
