Madonna. Justin Bieber. All seven members of BTS. Shakira and Burna Boy. Gustavo Dudamel. Jason Sudeikis in character as Ted Lasso. Chris Martin. Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. The most musical of the Muppets, and the entire children’s chorus from Staten Island’s P.S. 22. For the World Cup final’s first halftime show, the pitch seemed more crowded than a Buenos Aires fútbol bar at kickoff.
Throughout an impeccably choreographed, thematically jumbled and carefully fleet-footed 11 minutes and change, these performers valiantly attempted to justify the existence of a halftime show that, if some of the most vocal soccer fans are to be believed, very few people actually wanted.
Purists saw it as another concession to American spectacle, like the tournament’s advertising pauses that had euphemistically been dubbed “hydration breaks.” Fans of both teams worried what the added time — which amounted to an extra 12-and-a-half minutes, all told — would do to players’ midmatch routines. Even followers of the headlining musicians were left scratching their heads, wondering what a collaboration between such a culturally and sonically eclectic hodgepodge of acts might sound like.
We didn’t really get to find that out: The performances were all quite episodic, to the extent that they seemed to be taking place on different planes of existence.
Much as they did in the tournament’s opening match in Mexico City last month, Shakira and Burna Boy did a dutifully sunny take on this year’s World Cup theme song, “Dai Dai.” In a segment that appeared pretaped and segued into a live on-field entrance, Madonna kicked things off with a lively remix of her 2000 hit “Music” (interspersed with a few subtle nods to her recently released and surprisingly stellar new album “Confessions II”), providing the Global Citizen-produced halftime show with its broadly inoffensive thesis statement: “Music makes the people come together.”
Curated by Coldplay’s Chris Martin, the living personification of “good vibes only,” the halftime show emphasized love, unity and belief that the children are the future — all sentiments that no one would argue with.
Following a charmingly lighthearted interlude in which Dudamel conducted members of the New York Philharmonic, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of his native Venezuela and the Muppets in a rendition of “Seven Nation Army,” BTS popped up out of the on-field crowd to do a perfectly rote rendition of their 2020 English-language hit “Dynamite.” Like Madonna, BTS has also released a new hit album this year, the sleek and steely “Arirang,” but also like Madonna it opted — or, perhaps, were persuaded — to perform an older and more recognizable smash, in keeping with the halftime show’s attempt to entertain such a vast and varied audience with as little friction as possible.
Notably, the only performer to do the opposite was Justin Bieber, who telegraphed a certain degree of independence by playing a newer song, and one that hadn’t even been released as a proper single (though it has lately gone viral): “Everything Hallelujah,” a gospel-tinged R&B song from the second of his pair of 2025 LPs, “Swag II.” Introduced by Ted Lasso himself and wielding an acoustic guitar, Bieber delivered a sparse, sweetly sung performance. It was an energy drop in the show’s otherwise high-speed pacing, sure, but it was also a welcome moment of solitude and stillness amid the densely populated chaos. As he did during this year’s Grammys and a more recent set headlining Coachella, Bieber continues to reintroduce himself as a performer who can magically conjure intimacy in spaces where it is usually absent.
Save for the smash cut to Animal — the always-flailing musical Muppet — pounding out Meg White’s iconic beat on his drum kit, it might also have been the only moment that cut through the careful choreography enough to be remembered four years from now, when FIFA will decide whether it’s worth the trouble to do something like this again in 2030. In the end, the halftime show averted disaster: The turf seems to have been protected, the players survived their prolonged cool-downs and none of the performers totally embarrassed themselves. But it was also so seamlessly executed and tightly packed that its ultimate impression was one of overstuffed breathlessness. Dare I say it could have used a hydration break?
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