Justin Bieber was alone on the pitch with an acoustic guitar when the 80,000 inside MetLife Stadium went quiet. That moment, a stripped acoustic version of “Everything Hallelujah” leaning into intimacy over maximalism, was the strangest and most memorable sequence in the first World Cup Final halftime show, a compact 11-minute set that crammed more celebrity firepower into a sports intermission than any production in recent memory.
The show was always going to live or die by its ambition. FIFA and Global Citizen, the production team that spent three years attaching itself to the World Cup’s humanitarian goals, chose not to build something modest. The lineup headlined by Madonna, BTS, Shakira, and Bieber represented a calculated attempt to match the Super Bowl halftime show on its own terms, on football’s biggest night.
Whether it worked depended largely on where you sat. From the floor of MetLife, where Spain had just held Argentina scoreless through an abrasive first half, the spectacle was hard to dismiss.
Madonna did not walk out. She throttled through the stadium tunnels in a dune buggy, driven in a pre-recorded segment by Brazilian legends Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. The sequence, edited to a remix of her 2000 hit “Music” infused with elements of “Disco Inferno” and “Danceteria,” earned a roar when she appeared live on the pitch and handed off to conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who brought the New York Philharmonic and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra together for a version of “Seven Nation Army” that included, in a choice only a Global Citizen production could fully explain, Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy.
BTS arrived next, performing a football-rewritten version of their hit “Dynamite” in red motorcycle looks, their choreography tight and disciplined. The production team had clearly done their work: the K-pop set was the only moment during the show when the stadium sections that had been quiet through the first half came fully to life.
Then came the pivot. Bieber walked out alone. No dancers, no pyrotechnics, just the guitar and a version of “Everything Hallelujah” that slowly built into the song’s climactic hook. The contrast with what preceded it gave the moment its own weight. When it resolved into the crowd singing back the chorus, it felt less like stadium entertainment and more like something unplanned.
Shakira and Burna Boy closed the formal headline section with “Dai Dai,” the official FIFA World Cup song, performing alongside Uganda’s Ghetto Kids in a sea of yellow costumes. It was the loudest moment of the set. Coldplay’s Chris Martin, who curated the show alongside executive producer Guy Carrington of production company Done+Dusted, then joined the PS22 Chorus and Emmanuel Kelly for the finale, “We Dance,” a song Coldplay wrote specifically for the occasion. The stadium floor spelled “LOVE” in colored panels as fireworks went off overhead.
“This was always about bringing together the world’s top performers and creating a real moment of collaboration and unity,” Carrington said.
The show lasted precisely 11 minutes. FIFA’s rules give halftime a 15-minute window for broadcast, and the production had to work backwards from the technical requirements of resetting the pitch. A rainbow-colored tarp had been rolled out to protect the grass during the show, and its removal required the bulk of the window.
The format itself was the story in some ways. The Super Bowl halftime show has two and a half decades of infrastructure behind it: a dedicated production team, a standard runtime, an audience that has come to expect it. World Cup halftime shows do not exist in the same cultural context. Sunday night’s production was not just a performance; it was also an argument that football can support this kind of spectacle without the match becoming incidental.
That argument was tested when the second half began. Spain scored through Ferran Torres in extra time, eventually winning 1-0 after Argentina was reduced to 10 men. In the final sequence of the match, no one inside MetLife was talking about the halftime show. Trump, who attended the final as part of his effort to claim the tournament as a US political win, presented the trophy to Spain shortly after.
The performers themselves took different approaches to scale. Madonna’s dune buggy gambit was pure spectacle, a pop star making a sporting moment into a music video. BTS, performing for a global audience that skewed younger than most World Cup Final crowds, treated the assignment like a headline slot, not a cameo. Shakira, who grew up watching football in Colombia and has been associated with FIFA tournaments since 2010’s “Waka Waka,” moved through “Dai Dai” as though the pitch belonged to her.
Bieber was the outlier. His team made a decision that was either the most calculated or the most honest moment of the night: strip everything out, stand alone on the biggest stage in the world, and see if the song holds. It did. It also suggested that for all the spectacle around it, the World Cup halftime show found its most durable moment in its quietest one.
FIFA has confirmed that future World Cup Finals will include halftime shows, with the next tournament set for 2030 and co-hosted by Spain, Portugal, and Morocco. Sunday night established the baseline. The next question is whether FIFA builds on it or resets the template entirely.
The viewership numbers, when they come in, will settle part of the debate. FIFA estimates the final attracted the largest global television audience in history for any sporting event, with projections above 1.5 billion viewers across broadcast windows. Whether the halftime show converts any of that into sustained cultural momentum depends on whether the format earns another chance. Based on Sunday night, it did, as the Hollywood Reporter detailed in its full show breakdown.
Source: Eastern Herald
--Agencies
