Mexico is gearing up to celebrate the country’s trip to the Copa América Centenario soccer tournament, which starts in U.S. stadiums on June 3. But if you’re looking for soccer fanaticism without a pricey plane ticket to California, you can find it strung along the capital’s main boulevard Paseo de la Reforma in the form of a series of larger than life soccer balls, each decorated by a Mexican artist to express their love of the game.
The Balón CDMX orbs are a healthy meter and a half in diameter. But the standard size is the canvas for a host of aesthetic differences.
Some of the balls are painted with the faces of famous coaches, or generic on-field moments. Some are studded with explosions of black rubber “hair,” others bisected by a metal box.
One ball has been almost completely disguised as a metal bird’s head, and trapped inside a large cage that sits outside Bosque de Chapultepec’s Museum of Anthropology. Another is decorated with world flags, with holes revealing machinery inside the ball.
The National Autonomous University of Mexico’s (UNAM) ball is a particularly popular photo opportunity — it is decorated in the school’s colors and features recesses within the orb filled with gears emblazoned with UNAM’s beloved mascot, the puma.
Although the Copa América games don’t start until next Friday with a match between the United States and Colombia at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, soccer fans were already checking out the balls on a recent weekday afternoon, extending selfie sticks above their heads and giving each ball a once-over.
Balón CDMX was planned by the Mexican Federation of Soccer, whose press office did not respond to an interview request for this article. The sculptures are meant to convey the national enthusiasm for soccer, and for the world’s oldest tournament in the sport, the Copa América Centenario.
Mexico’s national team is projected to do well in the Copa matches. The Tri, as its nicknamed, has not lost any of its past 16 matches, since a November 2014 match up against Belarus in frigid temperatures.
And the country’s artists are honoring the sport in diverse ways, even critiquing it, with the balls that they designed. Artist Cecilia Beaven is from Mexico City and once painted a length of the border wall with the United States.
Her soccer ball shows the faces of interlocking humans, each with a different facial expression.
“What I wanted to make was a crowd,” Beaven told The News. “That’s the most interesting part of soccer for me. I find fandom fascinating, how people see this sport as a kind of religion.”
Sculptor Jorge Marín’s work can be seen throughout Mexico City. His bronze crouching human forms are on display at the airport, among other prime locations — he’s been making public art in the city for decades.
A few blocks from his Balón offering stands one of Marín’s most famous works, “Wings of the City,” which invites its audience to stand in front of its iron appendages and become one of Marín’s figures (usually for a beaming relative’s camera phone).
Marín’s ball “Átlatl” is similar to what residents have come to expect from the artist, who specializes in studies on the human experience. He’s constructed a larger than life winged figure crouched atop his orb, which has been smoothed past being an obvious reference to the sport. Átlatl means black heron in the indigenous language Nahuatl.
In a press release sent to The News, Marín said the piece is “a continuous movement, a feat where human players are made of myth and become heroes.”
“Átlatl” is one of a series of nine ball sculptures made by Marín, each named after a different bird in the Nahuatl language: Tecolotl, Kwixin, Axoquen, Totli, Tecoh, Cenzontlli, Quetzalli, Quecholl, and Astat.
The exhibit — which can be browsed on foot or, as most spectators will view it, from the window of a car stuck in Paseo de la Reforma traffic — offers a glimpse into how Mexicans view soccer, from visions of world corporations to takes on the sport’s power as a motivating force of human flight.
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