As the 2026 FIFA World Cup reaches its conclusion, thr33som3s delivers the most ambitious project of the artist’s career
For 35 days and across 102 matches, Brooklyn-based artist thr33som3s has been running a parallel tournament alongside the 2026 FIFA World Cup, one that tracks not just goals and on-field results, but five centuries of war, colonization, occupation, and invasion between competing nations.
The project, titled thr33som3s W3rld Cup 2026, centers around 48 original paintings, one for every participating country, each embedded with on-chain metadata documenting the historical conflict relationships between that nation and every other team in the tournament. The data, drawn from recorded history, maps aggressors and victims across every pairing. England emerges as the aggressor in 30 of 48 possible matchups. France in 28. Germany in 24. Cape Verde and Curaçao, former colonies, as aggressors in none.
As the tournament plays out, each match receives a conflict headline written by the artist, short, factual dispatches that reframe the sporting event as a continuation of history. The on-chain conflict matrix feeds into the dynamic tracking on thr33som3s’ website and makes visible what the slick corporate broadcast refuses to: these national teams carry with them all of their historical behaviors against the field.
The project also directly confronts the economics of the modern era of sport as entertainment. Record setting ticket prices to attend premier World Cup matches are, in thr33som3s’ framing, not incidental. They are the same mechanism of exclusion that has defined power relationships between nations for centuries. So he tasks his collector community to actively engage with this by creating a tiered admission system, where participation costs mirror the real-world pricing structures being critiqued.
Over the course of the tournament, collectors have burned editions of thr33som3s paintings to host matches, purchase admission, and predict winners of all the matches, even to serve as play-by-play announcers. These outcomes are followed in real time on a public tracker at thr33som3s.com/2026-w3rld-cup. The collectors’ participation data with the more than 23,000 editions of the 300 total new works created for the project is recorded on-chain and will be reflected in each painting’s unique metadata when the tournament concludes.
QUICK FACTS
- Project: thr33som3s W3rld Cup 2026
- Artist: thr33som3s (pseudonymous, brooklyn-based)
- Works: 48 original paintings, one per participating nation
- On-chain: conflict matrix metadata embedded in each NFT
- Duration: 34 days, 104 matches, June 11 – July 19, 2026
SUGGESTED STORY ANGLES
- The conflict matrix — a data artist maps 500 years of colonial history onto the world’s most watched sporting event
- The ticketing critique — how a Brooklyn NFT artist is using tiered admission mechanics to expose the class warfare baked into World Cup attendance
- Live conceptual art — a project that only exists fully when the collectors choose how the work is used, updating in real time with every match and every collector decision
- The on-chain record — when the tournament ends, the conflict data remains permanently embedded in the paintings, a historical document that can never be altered
- The output — 23,000 editions of close to 300 new works created in the six months leading up to a single sporting event
