As of halftime, the World Cup final Sunday was still anybody's game, with Argentina and Spain tied 0-0. But there's been one winner already – if for nothing but sheer logistics: FIFA managed to pull off its first-ever World Cup final halftime show, featuring a parade of many of the biggest names in music, from Madonna to Coldplay.
The organizers summoned big names from six continents, and oh boy, did they show up to represent.
- From North America: Justin Bieber and Madonna (whose new album just debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200).
- From Asia: the world's most famous K-pop group, BTS.
- From South America: Shakira (the undisputed World Cup queen) and conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who led hemisphere-spanning musicians from his two orchestras, the New York Philharmonic (where he will start as artistic and music director this September) and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela.
- From Africa: Burna Boy, the Afrobeats superstar who duetted with Shakira on this year's official World Cup song.
- From Europe, even in this post-Brexit era: Coldplay, fronted by Chris Martin.
- From Australia, the Iraq-born singer Emmanuel Kelly.
Plus the eternally lovable Muppets including Kermit and Miss Piggy, the viral dance troupe Ghetto Kids from Kampala, Uganda, who danced with Shakira, and children from Staten Island's PS22 Chorus, who closed out the show singing with Martin.
The lineup, announced this past week, signaled a feel-good, family-friendly procession of fan favorites, and that's exactly what the performers delivered. There wasn't much of a throughline in the 11-minute spectacle, save for some broadly inspiring strokes: Togetherness! Unity! Love! Madonna opened the show, reminding the audience in her roller rink setup that "music makes the people come together!" She was riding in a dune buggy manned by two of football's past kings from Brazil, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. What was a dune buggy doing in a roller rink? Best not to ask too many probing questions.
From there, the show unspooled into a series of celebrity cameos and brief reminders of memes from this year's Cup, from the orchestral musicians mimicking the widely beloved Norwegian row to the Congolese superfan Michel Nkuka Mboladinga, who performs at games as a living statue commemorating his country's slain independence leader Patrice Lumumba. The show also managed to tap into some non-World Cup soccer heartwarmers too: Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) and Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) were on hand to introduce Bieber — with a "Beliebe" sign, no less – and Dudamel and his musicians played the now-eternal stadium anthem, the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army," along with the Muppets Animal, Janice and Floyd Pepper.
The show was a vehicle for FIFA's charity arm, the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund, whose goal is to raise $100 million to expand education and soccer access for children worldwide. As kids from Staten Island's PS22 Chorus sang alongside Chris Martin in a riot of rainbow colors emblazoned with the word "LOVE," FIFA invited viewers to visit the fund's website, which exhorts folks to "use the power of love to defeat poverty and and defend the planet" – a rather apolitical, if not completely anodyne, goal in more normal times. But at a game attended by Melania Trump and President Trump – a leader whose sentiments about rainbows, global unity and good sportsmanship are not always similarly aligned – such visuals and messaging hit quite differently.
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