Madonna, Shakira, and BTS will share a stage at the World Cup final halftime show on July 19 at New York New Jersey Stadium, FIFA and Global Citizen announced Thursday — the first time the sport’s biggest match has borrowed the American Super Bowl’s playbook and wrapped a full-scale pop concert around its most watched 15 minutes.
Coldplay frontman Chris Martin is curating the show and broke the news in a promotional video that leaned heavily on nostalgia and goodwill, featuring Elmo, Cookie Monster, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, and Animal on the drums. Martin confirmed the lineup would include surprises beyond the three headliners. He described the event as being “all about togetherness — and everyone’s invited.”
The performance is not purely spectacle. It is anchored to a fundraising mission. The FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund aims to raise $100 million to expand access to quality education and football opportunities for children in underserved communities worldwide. More than $30 million has already been secured. One dollar from every ticket sold to any FIFA World Cup 2026 match will be directed toward social projects globally.
“Madonna, Shakira and BTS are global icons whose music transcends borders and generations, and we are proud to welcome them to the first-ever FIFA World Cup Final Halftime Show curated by Chris Martin of Coldplay,” FIFA President Gianni Infantino said in a statement. “This historic show will also shine a light on a greater purpose by supporting the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund and our shared mission to expand access to quality education and football opportunities for children worldwide.”
The Artists and What They Said
Each performer connected their participation to the education mission rather than the spectacle.
Madonna, the American pop institution whose career spans four decades, said the platform carried meaning beyond entertainment. “Without education, children are denied opportunity before they even have a chance,” Madonna said. “Every child deserves access to quality learning — because education expands possibilities and creates lasting change.”
Shakira, the Colombian singer who became globally synonymous with the 2010 World Cup through her song Waka Waka, returns to the tournament’s biggest stage in 2026. She is also a member of the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund advisory board — making her role at the halftime show both artistic and institutional. She said she would perform a new song called Dai Dai, written specifically for this World Cup and for the children the fund aims to reach. “I’ve spent my life doing two things — making songs and building schools,” Shakira said. “At the FIFA World Cup, those two paths come together.”
BTS, the South Korean group whose global fanbase has made them one of the most commercially dominant acts of the past decade, framed their participation in the language of music as a connector. “Music is the universal language of hope and harmony, and we’re honored to celebrate that power at the World Cup by connecting with millions of viewers around the world in support of children’s education,” the group said in a statement.
The Logistics and the Football Question
The show is being produced by Global Citizen in partnership with Live Nation and the production company Done and Dusted. Its length has not been officially confirmed, though it is widely understood to run approximately 11 minutes — a duration that creates an immediate practical tension with the structure of the sport it is interrupting.
A standard football halftime break runs roughly 15 minutes. That window exists for a combination of player recovery, tactical adjustments, commercial broadcasting, and analysis — the last of which matters enormously on the day of the World Cup final, when billions of viewers and the broadcasting teams serving them expect substantive review of what unfolded in the first half before the second begins. An 11-minute performance leaves almost no room for any of that.
Soccer has flirted with halftime entertainment before and the results have been cautionary. In 2017, German pop star Helene Fischer performed at halftime of the German Cup final in Berlin and was met with audible booing from the crowd. The criticism lasted weeks. The practice was dropped. FIFA is betting this attempt lands differently — on the biggest stage the sport has, in front of an American audience already conditioned by decades of Super Bowl halftime shows to expect exactly this kind of production.
Global Citizen Co-Founder and CEO Hugh Evans made the ambition explicit. “The FIFA World Cup is the most unifying event on Earth,” Evans said. “Together with FIFA and our curator Chris Martin of Coldplay, we wanted to create the first halftime moment in history focused on leaving a lasting legacy for children worldwide. My hope is that in a decade from now, we will see millions of lives impacted because of this historic moment.”
The Fund’s Advisory Board
The FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund has assembled an advisory board that spans sport, entertainment, and business. Members include FIFA President Infantino, Global Citizen’s Evans, Shakira, Australian actor Hugh Jackman, Ivanka Trump, Canadian artist The Weeknd, tennis great Serena Williams, Brazilian football legend Kaka, and Bank of America co-president Jim DeMare. FIFA and Global Citizen announced the first round of organizations receiving grants from the fund earlier this week, supporting programs combining education, sport, and community engagement across 10 countries.
When Football Borrows From the Super Bowl
The halftime show announcement is FIFA doing something it has resisted for most of its history — explicitly adopting an American entertainment format and grafting it onto the world’s most-watched sporting event. The Super Bowl halftime show has evolved over 60 years from a marching band performance into a televised cultural event that rivals the game itself in viewership and media coverage. FIFA is importing that model at the precise moment the World Cup comes to the United States for the first time since 1994.
The casting is deliberate and strategic on multiple levels. Madonna is American pop royalty — the home crowd act. Shakira is the voice the world already associates with the World Cup, a continuity link between the tournament’s history and its American present. BTS brings a global digital fanbase that crosses every demographic and geographic boundary FIFA’s sponsors care about.
Chris Martin as curator rather than performer is an interesting choice. Coldplay is currently one of the highest-grossing touring acts on the planet — their concerts are known for elaborate production and audience participation on a scale that translates well to stadium broadcasts. Using Martin as the architect rather than a headliner keeps the spotlight on the three acts while ensuring the production has someone with proven large-format event experience shaping it.
The Sesame Street and Muppets integration in the announcement video signals the show’s tonal ambition — nostalgic, inclusive, designed to land with children and parents simultaneously. That framing reinforces the education fund narrative and gives the show a purpose beyond celebrity spectacle, which matters for the portions of global football’s audience that remain skeptical of American-style entertainment infiltrating the sport.
The real test comes July 19 in New Jersey. If the show delivers and the football that follows it is great, the combination will be remembered as the moment the World Cup final became something bigger than 90 minutes of sport. If either element disappoints, if the show runs long, if the football suffers for the compressed analysis window, if the crowd in the stadium reacts the way Berlin reacted to Fischer in 2017 — FIFA will spend years answering for the experiment.
The fund’s $100 million target and the children it is meant to reach are real regardless of how the show lands artistically. What the halftime show does is put that cause in front of the largest single television audience on the planet. That is not nothing — it is, in fact, exactly what Global Citizen was built to do.
FIFA/DW
