A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel de Allende.
The plinth that held the FIFA World Cup trophy at MetLife Stadium was modeled in San Miguel de Allende. The story of 3DN, Pablo Cervantes, and how Mexican craft held everything up.
Mexico may not have made it to the final. Its artisans secretly did.
Let’s be honest about what happened on July 19th at MetLife Stadium. There was a lot to look at. Tom Cruise led what felt like half of Hollywood through the stands. Timothée Chalamet walked the official match ball onto the pitch like it was a red carpet in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Post Malone closed the pre-match ceremony with a brand-new song, the first halftime show in World Cup history was stacked with Shakira, Madonna, and BTS, and the trophy itself arrived in a hand-painted Louis Vuitton trunk: Monogram canvas, gold-plated brass, golden V’s for “Victory” and “Vuitton,” handcrafted at the maison’s ateliers outside Paris.
Spain beat Argentina 1-0 in extra time. Ferran Torres scored. Messi said goodbye. Fine. Fair enough.
But here’s what nobody stopped to look at: the stand underneath all of it. The plinth that held the Louis Vuitton trunk that held the World Cup, the literal foundation of the most watched object on the planet that afternoon, wasn’t made in Paris. It wasn’t made in New York. It was modeled in a studio in San Miguel de Allende and built in Querétaro.
Rewind two weeks. On July 5th, Mexico’s tournament ended at the Estadio Azteca: a 2-3 loss to England in the Round of 16, at home, in the stadium where an entire country believed, this time, it might be different.
The consensus afterward, at least everywhere we were listening, was swift: Mexico didn’t lose the World Cup. The World Cup lost Mexico. The tournament went on, but something went out of it. The street parties, the grito that shook stadium concrete, the sense that this event was being hosted rather than merely staged. Even those of us watching from outside Mexico felt strangely disenfranchised, cut off from a party we’d been promised. Mexico brings something to a World Cup that no broadcast package can manufacture, and for the final act, it was gone.
Or so we thought.
Because quietly, with no press release and no slow-motion reveal, Mexico was standing at the center of the pitch on July 19th. Holding everything up.
Behind the plinth is 3DN, a digital fabrication and 3D printing studio in San Miguel de Allende founded by Pablo Cervantes. If you live here, you may have walked past it without knowing what was incubating inside. The studio works where old and new craft meet: 3D scanning, modeling, and printing alongside restoration work, digitizing physical objects and rebuilding them with what 3DN calls total fidelity. It’s the kind of place that can resurrect a broken sculpture or prototype something that has never existed.
The job didn’t arrive with a phone call from Zurich. It came down a chain, the way work actually travels: FIFA hired a Brazilian company to produce the event, and the production hired Imperfacto, a taller in Querétaro, to build the piece. (Insert the Brazilian production company’s name; Pablo can get it.) Imperfacto needed someone who could 3D model the plinth and solve its production through digital manufacturing, as precisely as possible, and someone close enough to coordinate the fabrication on site in Querétaro. Through a colleague in Mexico City, they found Pablo, twenty minutes up the road.
The team was four people: Sara, Milton, Adrián, and Pablo. FIFA sent the design and the blueprints. Pablo’s job was to 3D model the piece in Rhino, prepare the files for 3D printing and laser cutting, and supervise the fabrication at Imperfacto’s workshop to make sure it matched the blueprints exactly. They had about a week.
“The hardest part was to solve the design with FIFA’s specifications in a limited time frame,” he says.
The finished plinth is a quiet feat of mixed craft: a steel structure, laser-cut MDF panels, 3D-printed plastic, and fiberglass, layered into one seamless piece. From Querétaro it was shipped to New York, where the production gave it its final finish. And through all of it, the project stayed a secret. A few friends and family knew. Nobody else.
Here’s the detail we can’t stop thinking about. After the piece shipped, nobody told Pablo whether it would actually be used. Productions change their minds. Backups exist. So on July 19th, while Tom Cruise settled into his seat at MetLife and a billion people tuned in, the man who modeled the plinth was on a bus, watching the final on his phone.
Then the trophy came out, and there it was. His work, at the center of the most watched broadcast on Earth.
“It was a very special project for me, to be involved in an event as important as the World Cup, hosted in my country. I wasn’t sure they were going to use it or not. I found out watching the final game on my phone, on a bus. When the realization that millions of people around the world just saw my work.”
— Pablo Cervantes, founder of 3DN
There’s a family echo in it, too. The last time FIFA came to Mexico, forty years ago for the 1986 World Cup, Pablo’s father was a manager at the tournament’s broadcasting center, the hub that fed the matches to televisions around the world. Two World Cups on Mexican soil, forty years apart, and two generations of the same family working behind the scenes. The father helped the world watch the tournament. The son built what the world was watching.
The plinth wasn’t Mexico’s only quiet takeover of this World Cup. Consider the jersey.
El Tri’s green kit didn’t just sell well. It became Adidas’s best-selling national team jersey of the entire tournament and the best-selling shirt in the federation’s history, with reports of more than three million sold. It sold out online and in stores as far away as New York before the England match. And after July 5th, the shirt of a team that was no longer playing kept outselling the shirts of teams that were. The fandom outlasted the football.
Then came the twist that could only happen here. The official Adidas shirt wasn’t made in Mexico; it was manufactured abroad, and as questions swirled about where and under what conditions, a quiet boycott bubbled up. Fans turned to the “knockoffs” sold on street corners and in tianguis across the country, and the joke was on Adidas: the so-called fakes were actually stitched in Mexico. Hecho en México in a way the official shirt never was. Call us romantic, but we’d say the pirated jersey was the more authentic one. (Verify before publish: manufacturing country and boycott scale; see notes.)
None of this should surprise anyone, and it only needs three sentences. The country that assembles aircraft and automobiles for the world is the same country where a vendor can stitch a jersey overnight and a four-person team can model, print, and build a pedestal for the most famous trophy on Earth in a week. Industrial scale on one end, artisan hands on the other. FIFA’s production needed something made beautifully, precisely, and quietly, and it knew where to look.
There’s something almost too poetic about the arrangement. The trophy: cast in gold. The trunk: built by French artisans in Asnières-sur-Seine, the same workshops that have made Louis Vuitton’s trunks since 1859. And beneath both, beneath the entire gleaming apparatus of global football and global luxury, the work of Mexican hands: steel, MDF, printed plastic, and fiberglass, modeled in San Miguel and built in Querétaro.
Because the final was, by design, an American spectacle: an NFL stadium in New Jersey, Hollywood in the stands, Chalamet with the ball, Post Malone on the mic, a halftime show engineered for Times Square. Mexico’s team watched from home like the rest of us. But Mexico never really left. It was on three million backs and countless counterfeit ones, on street corners selling a greener shade of green, and at the center of the pitch, holding up the trophy itself.
La selección went out in the Round of 16. The craft went all the way to the final, and everything else stood on top of it. Somewhere on a bus, the man who built it watched it happen on his phone.
A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel.
