Like hydration breaks and Donald Trump’s ability to get refereeing decisions overturned by simply phoning up the president of Fifa and complaining, the final half-time show is an innovation of the 2026 World Cup that comes with a degree of controversy attached. For one thing, its existence automatically means the World Cup final breaks the International Football Association’s 15-minute half-time mandate.
For another, its obvious antecedent lies in the NFL’s Super Bowl, where the half-time entertainment has mushroomed over the decades from a few marching bands to one of the big pop events of the year. To its detractors, it smacks of America not so much embracing the World Cup as imposing itself upon it.
But before you even got to the main event, there was more musical entertainment at the final to wade through, most notably the pre-match closing ceremony, a damp squib that neither the BBC nor ITV elected to broadcast live.
Anyone who hastened to iPlayer was rewarded not merely with Post Malone debuting what’s presumably the first single from his forthcoming album the Eternal Buzz, Chrome Heartbreaker (a pivot back to hip-hop-influenced pop after his recent diversion into country, should you be eagerly tracking the artistic vacillations of Post Malone’s career) and duetting with Swae Lee on their US chart-topper Sunflowers, but also an online influencer-cum-professional wrestler called IShowSpeed performing Champions, a track that gained so much traction online that Fifa felt obliged to include it on the official Fifa World Cup album.
A frightful cocktail of thunderous drums and autotuned vocals, it featured lyrics that make your average football song sound as erudite and profound as the oeuvre of Leonard Cohen: “I take a breath and wait for the ref / This is the World Cup, put your hands in the air.” Alas, news of its social media virality clearly hadn’t reached the audience in the New York New Jersey Stadium. The deathly silence at its conclusion made you wonder if perhaps the TV broadcast couldn’t pick up the sound of the crowd, but no: some fireworks subsequently went off and they went audibly mental.
There was, it turned out, more to come. Jennifer Hudson sang the Star-Spangled Banner. Dutifully flogging a dead horse with all the professionalism he could muster, Robbie Williams performed the Fifa anthem, Desire, in the company of Laura Pausini and Nicole Scherzinger. The ballad debuted at the draw ceremony in December and – like all the musical entertainment at said event – it was overshadowed by the news that Fifa had apparently started making up awards in order to give them to Donald Trump. It vanished into obscurity thereafter, failing to chart anywhere in the world. Listening to it exhumed for another airing, you were forced to concede that the world had a point.
After all that, the actual half-time show felt like a comparative triumph. You could argue that the bar had been set pretty low without much dissent, but nonetheless, it zipped along, cramming a lot into its 11 minutes by the simple expedient of paring songs down to their bare essentials and swiftly cutting between artists. Madonna performed a version of her 2000 hit Music – reworked over a backing track immediately recognisable as derived from the Trammps’ Disco Inferno – on a vaguely Mad Max-ish vehicle piloted by Ronaldo and Ronaldinho.
Then the strains of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army rang out, ostensibly performed by three members of the Muppets’ house band the Electric Mayhem. There was no sign of their leader, Dr Teeth, but perhaps he was indisposed, being treated backstage after being exposed to Champions by IShowSpeed. BTS rattled through Dynamite, Shakira and Burna Boy played a truncated version of Dai Dai – the solitary World Cup song in recent memory to actually impact on the British charts – and Coldplay performed a song called Believe in Love accompanied by a children’s choir: the latter looks horrendous on paper, but was far less sugary in reality, undercut by the farty blast of a crowd of vuvuzela players.
The solitary misstep might have involved allowing Justin Bieber to perform a downcast acoustic ballad, Everything Hallelujah – viral hit following his performance at Coachella or not, this perhaps wasn’t the moment for introspection – but no matter: if the half-time show wasn’t sufficiently head-spinning to convince the viewer it should be a regular occurrence at every World Cup final, it worked well enough to justify its existence at least this time. Although clearly not everyone felt the same way: “I thought it was crap,” offered Wayne Rooney, when pressed for his opinions by BBC presenter Gabby Logan.
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