FIFA is adding an 11-minute halftime show to Sunday’s World Cup final between Spain and Argentina at New York New Jersey Stadium, putting a Super Bowl-shaped entertainment slot inside a tournament that has traditionally left the break alone.
The lineup is built for scale: Justin Bieber, Madonna, BTS and Shakira are scheduled to perform, joined by Coldplay and a chorus from PS22 on Staten Island. Tom Cruise is also scheduled to appear during the closing ceremony before the match, according to ABC News.
Hugh Evans, chief executive of Global Citizen, said the idea began during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, when Coldplay’s Chris Martin called him with a proposal for a World Cup halftime show. Evans said he later raised the plan with FIFA president Gianni Infantino in Switzerland, only to find Infantino had already been thinking along similar lines and wanted to work with Coldplay.
The show is tied to a Global Citizen campaign seeking $100 million for youth education programs. FIFA is contributing $1 from every tournament ticket sold, according to Evans, and Shakira is donating royalties from “Dai Dai,” her World Cup anthem with Burna Boy, to the same effort.
The reception from football fans has been less choreographed. Some supporters see the show as another sign that FIFA is importing American sports television habits into a competition that did not ask for them. Similar complaints have followed the tournament’s hydration breaks, which FIFA has presented as heat protection but critics also view as convenient ad inventory.
Tiffany Naiman, director of UCLA’s Berry Gordy Music Industry Center, said the World Cup has usually used music through an anthem and an opening ceremony tied to the host country. An 11-minute mid-match production with names such as Madonna and Bieber can read, she said, as a made-for-TV American format grafted onto global football.
Naiman also noted that the artist list is not especially American. Bieber is Canadian, and Canada is one of the host nations. Most of the announced acts are from outside the United States. Her view is that FIFA is borrowing the Super Bowl’s production grammar while filling the slot with performers meant to match the tournament’s worldwide audience.
Global Citizen has already benefited from that audience. Evans said BTS fans raised about $40,000 for the education fund in the first week without being asked, while also flooding his social feeds with the group’s familiar purple hearts.
The betting-adjacent attention economy has noticed too. CNBC reported that Kalshi and Polymarket have seen tens of billions of dollars in World Cup prediction-market trading. One Kalshi market listed Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” as a possible song, while a Polymarket market pointed to “Dai Dai,” which appears likelier given its official World Cup role and Burna Boy’s scheduled involvement.
Producer Lee Rolontz said the compressed runtime forced the show into short chapters, with each artist getting roughly one minute and 45 seconds. The bigger technical problem is the grass. FIFA’s pitch standards leave little room for a pop production to chew up the playing surface, so Rolontz said the field will be covered and the staging, camera dollies and other rolling equipment have been built to avoid damage.
Rolontz said her team has only three to four minutes to move the show on and off the pitch. NFL field director Nick Pappas said by email that he shared practices for protecting playing surfaces during in-game concerts and entertainment, and that the NFL has worked with FIFA on matches in US stadiums during the World Cup and Club World Cup.
Rolontz said the show is not intended as a political statement. Isra Ali, a professor at NYU Steinhardt, said the broader politics around the tournament will still cling to it, including criticism of commercialization and concern over US-hosted World Cup conditions. The next hosts, Morocco, Portugal and Spain, will inherit whatever precedent FIFA sets on Sunday.
This story draws on original reporting from WIRED.
