Madonna, BTS and Shakira headlined the first half-time show ever staged at a FIFA World Cup final on Sunday, sharing an 11-minute medley at New York New Jersey Stadium with Justin Bieber, Burna Boy and, somewhat improbably, the Muppets.
The show was curated by Coldplay’s Chris Martin and aired live during the championship match between Argentina and Spain, marking the first time in the tournament’s history that the final has been interrupted for a musical performance.
Fitting that many stars into eleven minutes meant nobody got much room.
Most of the performers had roughly two minutes on the pitch, and in Madonna’s case, rather less than that.
The 67-year-old opened proceedings in a pre-recorded segment, riding a dune buggy through the tunnels beneath the stadium with Brazilian legends Ronaldo and Ronaldinho at the wheel, singing a reworked version of her 2000 hit Music laced with bits of Disco Inferno and Danceteria.
By the time she actually emerged into view of the live crowd, the song was essentially finished. She struck a pose and handed over.
What followed came thick and fast.
Gustavo Dudamel, the outgoing Los Angeles Philharmonic conductor, led musicians from the New York Philharmonic and Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra through Seven Nation Army, joined by Iranian violinist Bijan Mortazavi and the Muppets’ house band, Electric Mayhem.
BTS then took the pitch for a football-themed Dynamite, complete with rewritten lyrics, before Jason Sudeikis and Brendan Hunt turned up in character as Ted Lasso and Coach Beard to introduce the next act.
Their substitute was Bieber, 32, who stripped everything back to a solo acoustic reading of Everything Hallelujah from last year’s Swag II.
Shakira closed the star turn alongside Burna Boy, the pair reuniting after their appearance at the tournament’s opening ceremony in Mexico City last month to perform Dai Dai, the official song of the 2026 World Cup, backed by Uganda’s Ghetto Kids in bright yellow.
The finale belonged to more than fifty fifth-graders from PS22 in Staten Island, who sang We Dance, an original Coldplay song written for the occasion, joined by the band, Australian singer Emmanuel Kelly and yet more Muppets.
The length of it all had been a talking point for weeks, and the numbers explain why.
The performance itself came in a few seconds over its eleven-minute slot, but the half-time interval as a whole ran to 27 minutes and 22 seconds, the longest in World Cup history, and well beyond the maximum 15-minute stoppage that International Football Association Board rules entitle players to.
Not everyone was won over.
Wayne Rooney, on commentary duty for the BBC, offered a blunt verdict: “I like a lot of them artists, but I thought it was crap.”
Shakira, for her part, had been candid beforehand about how loose the whole thing still was.
“It’s going to be a shared halftime show,” she told The Capital Evening Showwith Jimmy Hill on 8 July.
“It’s going to be pretty historic, five amazing artists. Well, four amazing artists plus me.”
She admitted she was still working out how to make it feel different from her opening-ceremony set, and that the running order was being figured out almost until the last minute, she was, she said, as curious as anyone about how it would turn out.
The day had begun at a far gentler pace.
Post Malone headlined a pre-show that started 90 minutes before kick-off, running through Wow, Sunflower with Swae Lee, and a new track, Chrome Heartbreaker, teasing his long-delayed Eternal Buzzalbum.
Streamer-turned-singer iShowSpeed performed across a projected New York skyline.
Robbie Williams brought out Nicole Scherzinger and Laura Pausini for Desire, the official FIFA anthem he wrote, before escorting them off hand in hand.
Jennifer Hudson sang the US national anthem with a live band, and Tom Cruise addressed the crowd before kick-off.
“Football is a language spoken without words, a force that unites people,” he said.
The commercial and charitable side is substantial.
The half-time show supports the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund, which expands access to education and sports programmes for children in underserved communities.
With FIFA donating a dollar from every ticket sold across all 104 matches of the tournament, the fund has already raised $60 million against a $100 million target.
On 16 July, Global Citizen and FIFA named 31 grantees across 18 countries.
The 80,000-capacity stadium was close to full, with Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet, Pharrell, Matt Damon, Adrien Brody and Will Ferrell among those watching.
For all the wattage on the pitch, though, the loudest noise of the afternoon came from the football.
2026-07-20 04:31:00
