Context

SOMA is a football team that started with a WGSN report on emerging youth subcultures for 2026. Our challenge was to choose one of those communities and imagine a football team built specifically around the way they see the world.

We chose the New Age Mystics.

Which, yes, sounds slightly like a cult. But the more we looked into them, the less foreign they felt.

WGSN describes them as turning toward mysticism, ancient practices and alternative forms of spirituality to find meaning outside traditional systems. What interested us wasn’t really the witchy aesthetic of it all, but the search underneath it: how do you feel connected to something bigger than yourself?

That led us to ritual, movement, and the weird energy that happens when people intentionally do something together. You feel it at concerts, raves, protests, religious ceremonies…

And then we realized football has been doing this forever.

Football is already kind of a religion.

[IMAGE: football supporters / crowd ritual reference]

We didn’t need to make football spiritual. It already was.

The interesting part was what all that collective energy was being used for. Football celebrates belonging: our team, our colors, our people. But it also comes with a macho culture that can make that “us” feel pretty exclusive.

You can almost see the opposite during something like a World Cup, when suddenly families, casual fans and people who don’t know what offside means (and frankly don’t need to) are all celebrating together. The collective gets bigger.

So we asked:

What if you could keep football’s intensity, ritual and sense of belonging, but build the game around a collective that actually wants to expand?

Less me against you, more what can we create together?

That’s where SOMA started making sense.

So, how do you play football without really playing football?

Once winning wasn’t the point, we had to figure out what was.

We kept coming back to something central to the New Age Mystics: the connection between emotional, spiritual and physical experience. If SOMA was going to explore that through football, the body couldn’t just be there to perform. It had to become part of the concept.

That’s what led us to the limbic system, a group of structures in the brain associated with things like emotion, memory, motivation and our responses to what’s happening around us.

It gave us a physical counterpart to the more spiritual language we were already exploring through the seven chakras.

So we connected the two.

We translated seven functions into seven players: Impulse, Memory, Motivation, Intuition, Balance, Perception and Continuity, each paired with a chakra and given their own emotional role within the team.

7 chakras. 7 players. 7 parts of the limbic system.

Basically, one nervous system split across seven bodies.

And once we knew what each player was supposed to feel like, we ran into a much more interesting problem:

What does a feeling look like?

Instead of designing seven football kits, we started treating each player almost like a character.

[IMAGE: FASHION REFERENCES]

We looked at fashion, anatomy, architecture and natural structures to understand how something internal could become external. Iris van Herpen’s almost biological relationship with fabric was a big reference, while Dilara Findikoglu brought tension, exposure and a much more uncomfortable relationship with the body.

[IMAGE: NATURE REFERENCES]

Then came flower petals, leaf veins, roots, membranes and connective tissue. Our reference folder started looking like someone had mixed a fashion archive with a biology textbook.

We weren’t trying to make clothes that literally looked like parts of the brain. We were asking how Impulse might behave as a silhouette, Memory could become repetition, or Intuition might feel as a material.

[IMAGE: CHROMOS]

Seven different bodies, all belonging to the same organism.

Okay, but how do you actually generate collective energy?

This is where rave culture became really interesting to us.

[IMAGE: ROSALIA’S BERGHAIN]

Thousands of people gather in a dark room, repeat the same movements for hours and somehow experience something together. Rhythm, repetition, breathing, sensory overload, synchronization. Religious rituals, meditation, chanting, dance and sport have been using similar tools forever.

That gave us another connection. Our players couldn’t just represent emotion, memory or bodily perception. The experience had to engage the body too.

Movement, breathing, rhythm, repetition, sound and light became part of the game itself. Instead of moving only to score or defend, the players use them to build emotional states and synchronize as a group.

The choreography isn’t something happening around the match. It is the match.

And suddenly the name made a lot more sense:

SOMA. The body as a sensitive interface.

Connection wasn’t something you thought about. It was something you physically created together.

The system got bigger

Eventually, the same logic moved beyond the seven players.

We mapped the seven chakras onto seven locations across Barcelona, turning the city itself into part of the ritual.

One player had an emotional function. Seven players became one SOMA. Seven locations turned Barcelona into another kind of body.

The city wasn’t just where SOMA happened anymore. It became part of the system.

The ritual needed a space.

The same logic eventually reached the stadium. Inspired by Gaudí’s structural naturalism and Zaha Hadid’s fluid architecture, we imagined a space that felt less constructed and more grown, where light, color and architecture could become part of the ritual itself.

Connecting the dots

Looking back, the part of SOMA I find most interesting isn’t really the football, the clothes or even the final images.

It’s how many things that seemingly had nothing to do with each other ended up making sense together.

A WGSN subculture led us to spirituality and alternative forms of belonging. That led to football and collective ritual, then to rave culture, movement and the limbic system, which eventually shaped the players and the world around them.

Finding the thread between all of those things was the project.

And that’s probably the part of creative work I enjoy most: taking a pile of references, research and half connected ideas and figuring out what they have to say to each other.

The AI imagery came at the end. It helped us visualize the world, but it wasn’t the idea.

Research → connection → concept → world building → visual expression.

Apparently, this time that process led to a spiritual football league.