THE FOOTBALLISATION OF THE CONTEMPORARY ART MARKET
I’m dedicating this article to the artist Pauline Faieff, through whom I discovered a genuine passion for the French national football team. The two weeks we spent together in Rome gave me an excuse to reconnect with my love of sport and to look more closely at the well-oiled machine operating behind every player. For several years now, I’ve been convinced that the contemporary art world is becoming increasingly “sportified”, even “footballised.” The beginnings of this reflection came with my discovery of artist Aurore Le Duc and her series Gallery Supporters. In it, she transformed art galleries into football clubs through a series of scarves emblazoned with names such as “MENNOUR” or “PERROTIN”, drawing a parallel between the fervour of football supporters and that of collectors. What Le Duc was already pointing to in 2015 has only intensified since: the original purpose of the work, like the original purpose of the game, has been eclipsed by a logic of benchmark value and commercial image. Because let’s be honest: a major gallery today operates exactly like a major football club. We no longer defend a work; we defend a brand. We no longer look for talent; we look for an asset. We no longer build a career; we optimise a transfer. Artists, like players, are recruited young, formatted quickly and discarded early if they fail to perform fast enough and immediately hailed as geniuses the moment they start generating returns. The difference is that at least football openly acknowledges its economic brutality. Art still wraps itself in the language of vocation and sensitivity in order to disguise a machine that can be every bit as predatory.
Lesson No. 1: Find a Sponsor
No elite footballer steps onto the pitch without a logo stitched onto their shirt. Désiré Doué excepted, perhaps but not everyone is Désiré Doué. Finding a sponsor for a footballer is not treated as an inconvenience; it is an openly accepted pillar of the economic model. To the point where, today, a club without a title sponsor can raise more concern than a club without a striker. Football understood a long time ago that performance alone never finances performance. Ask an emerging artist whether they have a sponsorship strategy, however, and nine times out of ten you’ll be met with an awkward silence or a faintly disgusted expression, as though the very idea of associating with a sponsor somehow contaminated the purity of the creative act. We would rather beg for a grant every two years, hope for a miraculous residency, or empty our personal bank account to produce the next exhibition than go out and directly seek an economic partner. If you ask me, this has nothing to do with artistic purity and everything to do with amateurism. A club does not ask its sponsor to understand the offside rule, I still don’t fully understand it myself. A club negotiates visibility, a deal, an association of images. Full stop. Contemporary artists should do the same. They should stop looking for a patron who “believes in their art” and start building partnerships in which everyone knows exactly what they are selling and exactly what they are buying. As long as artists continue to treat sponsorship as a betrayal of their vocation rather than a strategic revenue stream, they will keep playing the match eleven against one, with no bench, no staff and not a cent to get through the season.
The workshop on finding a sponsor for your next exhibition is available here: https://luma.com/xiq1bowf
The free quiz to work out how much to ask your sponsor for is available here: https://tally.so/r/VLAjNM
Lesson No. 2: Build Your Personal Brand
No elite footballer leaves their image to chance. There is a visual identity, social media accounts managed by agencies, carefully calibrated interviews, a coherent narrative linking the athlete to the person… To the point where some players today are worth almost as much for their image as they are for their statistics on the pitch. In football, nobody expects a player to be authentic by accident; the story they tell the world is built methodically. Artists, meanwhile, continue to treat the management of their public image as something frivolous. We settle for an Instagram account run on instinct, no editorial direction whatsoever, and a website that has not been updated since the last exhibition. It is a strategic mistake disguised as a moral position. Today’s collector, like a club sponsor, buys into a story, a trajectory, a coherence between the discourse and the work. An artist whose journey cannot be explained clearly in three sentences does not exist in the conversations that matter, regardless of the quality of the work. Because we do not remember what we cannot understand quickly enough. Building a personal brand simply means refusing to let chance decide how you will be perceived, by collectors, institutions or the press. A player never lets someone else tell their story if they can embody it themselves. An artist who dismisses their own image eventually leaves it in other people’s hands, and rarely to their advantage.
The replay of the workshop on growing your Instagram is available here: https://luma.com/3rciewzb
Lesson No. 3: Listen to Data and Strategy
Twenty years ago, a scout would go and watch a match on a Sunday afternoon, trust their eye, and go home convinced they had “felt” something in a player. Today, that same scout cross-checks intuition against heat maps, xG, duel-win rates on wet surfaces, and an algorithm predicting the player’s resale value three years from now. Instinct has not disappeared; it has simply stopped making decisions on its own. A club that still recruits purely “on instinct” in 2026 is no longer scouting, it is gambling. The art world, meanwhile, continues to tell itself the opposite story with almost childlike pride: the collector who “falls in love” with a painting, the gallerist who “spots” an artist before everyone else, the curator who simply “has an eye”. It is a beautiful story. It is also, increasingly, a lie. The data exists, indexed auction sales, secondary-market prices, exhibition engagement rates, institutional acquisition histories, but we would rather continue playing the inspired aesthete than admit that we are managing a career, not witnessing a mystical revelation. An artist who ignores their own data is playing a match without ever looking at the scoreboard. How many works sold, at what price, to what type of collector, in which geographic market, after which exhibition… These are the basic pieces of information that allow you to know whether you are progressing or simply standing still while telling yourself that you are “building a body of work over time”. Football eventually understood that instinct without data is a gamble, and data without instinct is blind. Art still prefers the gamble, especially when it is not the art world losing the stake, but the artist.
The replay of the workshop on new art-market trends is available here: https://luma.com/jply2rt9
Lesson No. 4: Aim Internationally
No player with their sights set on the Ballon d’Or builds an entire career in a single league simply out of comfort or sentimental attachment to their first club. You leave Lyon for Manchester, Manchester for Madrid, Madrid for Saudi Arabia if the cheque is large enough, not because you lack loyalty, but because every league you move through adds a layer of credibility the previous one could not provide. Staying in a single league, however prestigious, mechanically limits your market value, because you become a local reference while the game itself is played globally. Contemporary art, however, loves to praise artists who are “rooted in a territory”, as though staying put were an aesthetic virtue rather than, very often, simply the result of lacking the network or resources to leave. We celebrate “the Paris scene”, “the Berlin scene”, “the Milan scene” as though they were identity strongholds, when in reality they often become glass ceilings for anyone who never moves beyond them. An artist who exhibits only where they grew up does not have a strong identity; they have a narrow network. A footballer who succeeds in the Premier League does not betray the training they received in Marseille; they simply multiply its value elsewhere. An artist who exhibits in Rome, then Brussels, then New York does not dilute their message; they force the entire market to take them seriously, rather than only one scene at a time. Staying home is comfortable. But comfort has never increased anyone’s market value.
To discuss developing your career internationally, follow this link: https://www.annelisestern.com/service-page/s%C3%A9ance-1-1-1-%C3%A0-2h-avec-annelise-stern
Lesson No. 5: Protect Your Mental Health
No elite club recruits a player today without making sure that somewhere in the organisation, a mental-performance coach or psychologist is there to support them. Mental health is now treated as a budget line, and a squad with no psychological support is rightly regarded as professionally negligent. Contemporary art, meanwhile, continues to cultivate a particularly toxic romantic myth: that of the tortured artist whose anxiety is somehow the raw material of genius. We glorify insomnia, production anxiety, nervous exhaustion before an opening, as though suffering were proof of creative sincerity and seeking support an admission of weakness. We have turned psychological distress into a marketing argument instead of treating it as a problem. And yet artists today absorb pressure comparable to that of elite athletes: constant exposure on social media, instant public judgement, chronic financial insecurity, endless comparison with hyper-visible peers, and the obligation to “perform” with every new project… With no staff. No support. Not even the vocabulary to describe what is happening to them, because the art world prefers to call it “creative doubt” rather than mental health. A player who silently collapses costs a club money, so the club surrounds them with support. An artist who silently collapses pays the price themselves, while the art world continues looking the other way, only to celebrate the posthumous work later as belated proof of a talent nobody bothered to protect while they were alive. Football understood that protecting a player’s mental health means protecting the investment. Art needs to catch up.
My name is Annelise Stern.
I am an artist agent, curator, author and speaker specialising in the contemporary art market and impact-driven projects, particularly those involving new technologies.
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