How ‘Home of Football’ turned World Cup fandom into a cultural experience

Luxury found common ground with sport at this year’s Fifa World Cup — not through sponsorship logos or hospitality suites alone, but through cultural experiences that merged storytelling, design, retail and community. Soccer is a global cultural language, and the brands shaping its future understand that fans now want immersion as much as spectacle. One of the clearest examples came from Home of Football, a new cultural platform that launched June 22 with “Home and Away,” a month-long exhibition at New York’s High Line Nine gallery, between Chelsea and Hudson Yards, where design, collectible culture, technology and experiential retail converged. The show closed July 19, the day of the final. Designed by Harry Nuriev’s Crosby Studios and curated by Paris-based arts collective Air Afrique, the exhibition was produced by Leslie Russo, founder and CEO of The Culture Shop. It reflected a broader shift across luxury: the rise of experiences that sit at the intersection of fashion, sport, art and commerce. From memorabilia to cultural capital Soccer — with about five billion fans worldwide, according to Fifa — has become one of the most powerful cultural platforms available. Instead of treating memorabilia as static artifacts, “Home and Away” presented the sport’s history through the language of luxury exhibition design. At its center were more than 60 objects from the Manzano Heritage Collection, a private archive shown publicly for the first time, selected by Air Afrique: Pelé’s 1958 World Cup jersey, Lionel Messi’s 2006 debut World Cup jersey and artifacts from Brazil’s 2002 victory among them. The curation connected legendary players, defining matches, national pride and generational fandom. Visitors weren’t simply viewing objects behind glass; they were walking through the emotional history of the world’s most beloved sport. “Football has always been about memory, identity and community,” said Josh Murphy, co-founder of Home of Football. “Our goal was to preserve that history while presenting it in a way that feels relevant to today's cultural audiences.” This approach mirrors a larger movement within luxury, where heritage is communicated through immersive environments that encourage discovery, participation and emotional connection. The new convergence of luxury, sport and culture Sport has drawn steady luxury investment through partnerships with Formula 1, tennis, basketball and football. The next chapter turns on participation rather than visibility alone. Consumers expect experiences that combine several passions — fashion, design, technology, entertainment and sport — within a single destination. “Home and Away” embodied that convergence. Visitors moved between historical storytelling, immersive design, cultural programming and retail, an arrangement closer to a luxury cultural institution than a sports exhibition. Home of Football offered a blueprint for how brands can build around global sporting moments like the World Cup without relying solely on traditional sponsorship models. Producing culture rather than events Behind experiences like this sits a newer breed of cultural producer operating beyond traditional experiential marketing. Russo, formerly president of IMG’s Global Fashion Events Division, founded The Culture Shop in 2023 to build original intellectual property and large-scale cultural experiences across fashion, sports, entertainment and art. Her company treats events not as isolated moments but as platforms where programming, hospitality, retail, design and storytelling reinforce one another. “Luxury today isn’t about exclusivity alone — it’s about creating cultural relevance, which is a form of currency,” Russo said. “‘Home of Football’ demonstrates that the future belongs to experiences where sport, fashion, design and commerce coexist naturally. Fans don’t simply want to observe culture anymore — they want to be immersed inside of it.” As luxury increasingly shifts toward participation over possession, this style of cultural production is becoming an increasingly valuable capability for global brands. Design as a luxury language To lift the experience beyond a traditional sports exhibition, Nuriev and Crosby Studios approached it as a cultural installation rather than a museum display, unfolding across six chapters behind a metallic facade, with mint green carpeting recalling a pitch and circular forms nodding to the ball itself. Known for bringing contemporary art, fashion and architecture into dialogue with luxury brands including Baccarat, Balenciaga, Valentino and Dover Street Market, Nuriev blurred the lines between gallery, retail destination and immersive environment — a space aimed at football enthusiasts, collectors, fashion audiences and design aficionados alike. The design language reflected a growing truth within luxury: physical spaces have become one of the most important storytelling mediums available to brands. Nuriev, Harry Nuriev, Founder of Crosby Studios, said: “Football already possesses incredible emotional architecture. Our role was to translate that emotion into physical space using the visual language of contemporary design. This project became a form of cultural transformism — where football, fashion and art merge into a single experience.” Retail innovation meets fan engagement While design carried the emotional load, technology shaped how visitors shopped. Crosby Studios designed the exhibition’s concept store, with SAP supplying the technology underneath — connecting retail operations with real-time data to shape how fans browsed and bought. Rather than functioning as a conventional merchandise shop, the space tested how digital tools can personalize discovery and streamline commerce. SAP had run a similar experiment months earlier: the Retail Innovation Lab by NYFW Collections and SAP, which opened at the same High Line Nine venue during New York Fashion Week in February, co-developed with Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne of New York label Public School. Taken together, the two projects show SAP positioning itself beyond enterprise software — as a technology partner for luxury, fashion and sports organizations rethinking physical retail for an experience-driven consumer. Products, on this logic, are bought as extensions of experiences rather than standalone goods. Looking ahead Few events can unite billions of people in a shared emotional experience the way the World Cup does. For luxury brands, its significance extends beyond hospitality or sponsorship rights — it is a chance to build cultural experiences around identity, craftsmanship and community. By bringing together museum-quality storytelling, contemporary design, enterprise technology and experiential retail, “Home and Away” showed how the boundaries between luxury, sport, fashion and culture continue to dissolve. As brands prepare for the next generation of global sporting events, the most valuable currency may no longer be visibility alone, but the ability to create experiences people remember long after the final whistle.

How ‘Home of Football’ turned World Cup fandom into a cultural experience

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How ‘Home of Football’ turned World Cup fandom into a cultural experience

How Bottega Veneta weaved China’s forever it bag