An A.I. portrait created by Refik Anadol and based on soccer star Lionel Messi’s favorite goal has just netted a cool $1.87 million at Christie’s.
The goal, handpicked by Messi, is his header in the 2009 Champions League final against Manchester United, in which the diminutive forward sneaks in behind the United defense and leaps to meet Xavi’s whipped cross with a header whose weird parabola nestles perfectly in the net. It clinched the match, sending Barcelona on the way to winning a first treble. Among more than 860 goals the Argentine has scored over his two decades on the field, it’s one that he deems “a special moment in my career.”
That moment in 2009 was reimagined by Anadol as an A.I. artwork titled A Goal in Life, which was installed at Christie’s New York headquarters between July 12–22, before going under the hammer at an online auction. Proceeds from the sale will benefit education programs across five countries in Latin America and the Caribbean that are supported by Inter Miami CF Foundation.
Refik Anadol, Living Memory: Messi — A Goal in Life (2025). Photo courtesy © Refik Anadol Studio.
Anadol, the Los Angeles-based media artist who specializes in crafting hypnotic visualizations of unimaginably large datasets, calls A Goal in Life a “memory temple.” This, in essence, means people are encouraged to stand in a mirrored room of encircling screens of 16K resolution and relive the moment. It’s not about nostalgia, Anadol said, but about reaching into those precious seconds in which the sinews of Messi’s neck stretched and strained and using art to recapture “what Messi felt, what the crowd felt.”
Refik Anadol, Living Memory: Messi — A Goal in Life (2025). Photo courtesy © Refik Anadol Studio.
No small task, then. To achieve it, Anadol has employed millions of data points to create the eight-minute long video (or an A.I. Data Sculpture as the Turkey-born artist calls it). The video’s base layer is the on-pitch moment itself, from which Anadol traced Messi’s every movement and gesture by extracting 17 points of the player’s body. Layered in between is Messi’s emotional relationship to the goal, as he revealed during interviews in which his biometric voice data, breathing patterns, and heartbeat rhythms were recorded.
The result is one that will be familiar to those who have stood in the beguiling glow of Anadol’s work before—whether in London, Los Angeles, Seoul, or New York. A Goal in Life is in constant flux, shifting seamlessly between a studio Messi sits calmly answering questions, to panoramic angles of that moment 16 years ago, to digitizations in which Messi appears as though on an anthropometric grid, to scenes of seemingly pure abstraction in which waves of color pool and sway.
Refik Anadol, Living Memory: Messi — A Goal in Life (2025). Photo courtesy © Refik Anadol Studio.
“For me, this work is about transforming the data from Messi’s favorite goal into living memory—something that we have never done before,” Anadol said. “This work redefines how we experience memory through art.”
The winning bidder will receive a certificate of authenticity signed by both Messi and Anadol—as well as the chance to relive that magic moment at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome over and over and over again.