If you looked veeeeeery closely outside the Rockefeller Center in New York during the FIFA World Cup 2026™, you might have been able to spot a… 28 ft. (8.5m) tall, 8-tonne LEGO® World Cup™ Trophy made out of 1,363,402 LEGO bricks.
Unveiling the LEGO® FIFA World Cup™ Trophy
Yeah, you really needed to search for it…
But how in the World Cup™ did we manage to build it?
This project was born while we were searching for the perfect way to celebrate the FIFA World Cup 2026™ in the US, Canada and Mexico.
If you’ve been following our Everyone Wants A Piece campaign, you’ll already know about our football sets, including a 14.5 in. (36cm) tall LEGO FIFA World Cup™ trophy.
But we really wanted to challenge ourselves and answer the ultimate mission of the World Cup™: to unite the world through football.
(... and have a lot of fun while doing it, of course...)
To do that, we knew we needed to do something seismic. Something big.
And when it comes to making something big, there’s only one place we could call.
Kladno.
Our Kladno factory in Czechia has been responsible for some of the most innovative and flat-out incredible LEGO builds ever made.
Since opening in 2000, Kladno have specialized in creating big builds all around the world. From life-sized, fully-drivable supercars to the 6,316,611-piece, 49 ft. (15m) tall Tree of Creativity in LEGO House, Billund, Denmark.
It made sense, therefore, to take our FIFA World Cup™ Trophy set to Kladno… and see how big we could make it!
And when we say ‘we’, we mean 59 of our Kladno colleagues, split into:
- 1 Project manager
- 3 Designers (all massive football fans who were absolutely living the dream during this project)
- 2 Mechanical engineers
- 1 Manufacturing engineer
- 48 Model builders
- 4 Assembly technicians
The biggest challenge for Kladno wasn’t whether they could build an 28-foot (8m) World Cup™ Trophy out of LEGO bricks (what a nuts sentence that is...)
It was simply the time.
We needed to get this model built in just 8 months. That might seem like a long time, but… erm... it isn’t. In fact, it’s an unprecedentedly short amount of time for a project this big.
The challenge was made EVEN greater by the fact we needed to make it secure enough to be placed on public display in New York… after being transported across the world without breaking… while being easy to assemble and disassemble at speed.
In 8 months. Where to even begin?
As it turns out, the building instructions for our much smaller (but equally awesome) set were a good start. The team followed the instructions and even used the same split-line patterns found between the individual bricks.
From that starting point, the Kladno team designed a steel skeleton to keep the planned 4.2 tonnes of bricks in place.
It took 12 weeks to design and precisely weld that steel skeleton, which ultimately weighed 3.5 tonnes on its own!
Soon it was time to get cracking on adding the 1.3 million bricks(!!) to the structure. And for those of you who know all about the FIFA World Cup™ Trophy… that meant a whole lot of gold!
In fact, a whopping 80% of the 30.6-acre (124,000m2) Kladno site ended up being used for this single project, turning the production floor into a sea of yellow bricks!
The Kladno team consider this build the largest mobile build they’ve ever made. Anything else of this size has always been installed in a permanent position, whereas their mega build was designed to bring the joy of the FIFA World Cup™ to different locations and different people.
Which, of course, was what this build was all about. A fun way of reminding football fans that they are part of a global community. That they are connected with people who may be hugely different from them, but who share their love for football.
In other words, it’s a build that tells us that we are part of something big.
FIFA®
