PSG × Edgar Plans: From Animal Heroes to Art Basel Jerseys
How Edgar Plans carries his Animal Heroes from paintings into PSG posters, bikes, a Kevin Durant collectible and the 2026 Art Basel jersey.
A football shirt can carry a whole crowd. Edgar Plans takes that idea literally. On his 2026 Paris Saint-Germain edition, a mass of small, masked characters gathers around the club’s imagery, spilling across the lower half of the jersey. The sponsor sits above them. The little heroes get the ground floor. Turn it around and the message is blunt: BACK 2 BACK.
That shirt is one chapter in a relationship that has moved through match posters, customised bicycles and a resin sculpture of Kevin Durant. Each format gives Plans a different surface, while the characters keep their identity. PSG gets a visual universe that can travel. Plans gets a club whose supporters already understand how an image, a badge or a colour can hold an emotional charge.
The collaboration becomes more interesting when you follow it back to the paintings. Those large canvases, smaller portraits and crowded Art Notes are where the artist builds his cast and gives it something to do. Understanding that studio work makes the PSG projects read as part of an ongoing practice.
The Animal Heroes were here first
Born in Madrid in 1977 and based in Asturias, Plans developed a vocabulary fed by graffiti, comic books and illustration. Almine Rech’s account of his 2021 Paris exhibition also traces the influence of his father, a writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction who encouraged his reading. There is a storyteller’s logic to the work: invent a character, give it a recognisable shape, then keep changing the world around it.
His Animal Heroes have rounded bodies, masks and the confidence of children playing dress-up. Their apparent simplicity creates room for harder subjects. Gallery accounts connect the characters to questions of racism, gender violence and social exclusion. The costume makes a figure instantly approachable; the surrounding scene decides how comfortable the encounter stays. Almine Rech’s exhibition text explains that tension through his literary portraits.
For a football club, this is a useful kind of recognisability. A mascot normally belongs to one institution. Plans’s heroes arrive with a history of their own. A PSG shirt, a basketball or a bike can enter that history without swallowing the character whole. The artist’s identity stays visible alongside the crest.
2024: the Barcelona poster starts the story
PSG identifies the poster for its 2024 Champions League quarter-final against FC Barcelona as an earlier collaboration with Plans. A match poster is a natural entry point: a fixed occasion, two clubs and an audience primed to remember the night. It gives an artist a tightly defined brief with enough room to shift the atmosphere.
The format also changes how football gets archived. A score records the result. A photograph freezes a play. An artist’s poster holds a mood. Framed later, it lets a supporter revisit the fixture through someone else’s imagination. That is a different proposition from another photograph of a player lifting his arms.
PSG’s 2025 announcement explicitly links the Barcelona poster, the subsequent bicycle customisations and the Kevin Durant sculpture. The club describes an artistic partnership with successive projects. That continuity matters: it gives the work a history fans can follow, collect and compare.
The canvases explain the scale
Plans’s painting practice moves between dense environments and isolated characters. At Almine Rech Brussels, The Wall, shown from December 2021 into January 2022, paired a large painting with seven small works. Street Art Park (2021), catalogued as mixed media on canvas at 183 × 213 cm framed, set the scene. Small portraits such as Skater, Hero Girl and The Reader measured just 22 × 23 cm each.
The gallery describes a skate park of suspended ramps, games and graffiti. Across that installation, a viewer could take in an entire playground, then meet its inhabitants at close range. That shift from environment to individual is central to the appeal: the figures can fill a busy composition or stand alone as an object on a shelf. The exhibition’s artwork list makes the difference in scale tangible.
The later Heart of Fearlessness exhibition at Tang Contemporary Art in Hong Kong, running March 25–May 10, 2024, brought sporting references into that larger vocabulary. John Stockton (2023) and AIR, Tribute to Michael Jordan (2023) use shaped wood and wood on canvas. The basketball names are already embedded in the studio work, ahead of the PSG × Durant release.
Game Over, Insert New Planet (2023), a 180 × 180 cm mixed-media canvas, pushes the familiar characters toward an environmental question. Glaciación (2023) and Invasion of the body snatchers (2024) extend the exhibition’s inventory, while Ghost art notes and Tennis Art Notes are works on paper. These are independent artworks in Plans’s practice; the PSG jerseys and posters are editions developed for the club. Tang’s catalogue supplies the titles, dates and materials.
A printed image gives you a composition at a reproducible scale. A canvas adds a physical surface, an edge, layered marks and the distance between a small gesture and a large field. The PSG editions make more sense when both experiences remain in view. The characters may travel easily, but the painting gives them room to become unruly.
The painting behind the character
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December 2024: art enters the equipment
On December 4, 2024, PSG and Nike introduced the vintage cycling-inspired Cycling Redefined collection. The launch brought Luis Enrique together with Groupama-FDJ riders Stefan Küng and Quentin Pacher and team manager Marc Madiot. Plans personalised bicycles for the occasion. The group’s programme included a ride from Parc des Princes to the club’s training campus.
The Parc’s cycling history gave the event a local anchor: PSG’s launch account recalls the stadium’s long association with Tour de France finishes. Plans’s intervention put his mark on a working sporting object. A bike frame has tubes, joints and narrow surfaces; it asks for a different placement of imagery than a square canvas or flat poster. The collaboration’s range expands with the shape of the object. PSG’s December 2024 launch report documents the event, and its 2025 partnership announcement recalls the bicycle customisations.
2025: Kevin Durant becomes a collectible
For the PSG House pop-up on Melrose in Los Angeles, open June 14–23, 2025, Plans created a resin sculpture honouring Kevin Durant, limited to 250 pieces. It placed his character language directly inside the club’s American programme. Football, basketball and the art-toy audience could recognise different parts of the same object.
An art toy changes the encounter again. A poster is viewed from one side. A figure occupies space: it has a silhouette, a stance and a relationship to the things around it. For collectors who move between sneakers, jerseys and sculpture, that physical presence is part of the attraction. Plans’s characters were well suited to the move because their bodies already read as compact, self-contained personalities.
The release sat within a broader Durant capsule, but Plans’s authorship was specifically attached to the sculpture. ToyZone also documented the project in its manufacturing portfolio, published in June 2025. That production context adds another layer: a character drawn by an artist has to become an object that can be formed, finished and reproduced.
By February 2026, PSG’s Ici C’est Paris La Maison programme in London was displaying the Plans × PSG × Durant art toy among the club’s recurring collaborations. The object had a life beyond its original Los Angeles launch. Moving it between cities also moved the association between the artist, the basketball player and the football club. PSG’s London programme records that display.
PSG, Plans and Kevin Durant / 2025 campaign
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2026: the jersey enters Art Basel
The 2026 collection with Art Basel brought the partnership back to football. PSG described a limited run of 150 numbered jerseys and posters celebrating its 2026 Champions League triumph. The announced release began through the Art Basel Shop during the June 18–21 fair in Basel, with a later release planned through the club’s retail network. Plans also had a June 18 signing session scheduled at the Qatar Lounge.
The campaign imagery puts the artwork low on the front of a pale jersey, allowing the crowd of characters to build upward around the football imagery. The back carries the BACK 2 BACK statement. The result is immediately legible as a PSG shirt, while the density of Plans’s drawing rewards a closer look. At a distance you see the club. Up close, you start picking out the cast.
The numbering gives the edition a defined limit. The poster offers the composition for a wall; the jersey puts it into circulation on a body. Those are two different ways of living with the image. PSG’s official collection announcement sets out the edition and launch plan; current retail availability depends on the relevant store.
The Art Basel jersey edition
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A visual language that keeps moving
Across the projects, Plans keeps translating the same imaginative cast into new situations. A fixture gives him a story. A bicycle gives him equipment. Durant gives him a sporting personality to rework in three dimensions. A championship gives him a crowd and a shirt on which to assemble it.
That accumulation is what makes the PSG relationship worth following. Each object gives the next one some context. The match poster now sits at the beginning of a sequence, and the Art Basel jersey carries more than a single season’s result. Behind all of it are the canvases: the places where Plans’s heroes can keep playing, arguing and taking up space before they head out into the world again.
