The official rules of soccer could not be much clearer: “Players are entitled to an interval at halftime, not exceeding 15 minutes.”
And the lineup for Sunday’s inaugural halftime show at a World Cup final could not be much fuller: Madonna, Justin Bieber, Shakira and BTS as headliners, plus Burna Boy, a Staten Island elementary school chorus and the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.
Get ready for tradition to be tested.
FIFA, the World Cup’s organizing body, approved a halftime show in hopes it would attract more casual fans during a championship match between Spain and Argentina that is expected to exceed more than one billion viewers — five times the audience of the Super Bowl.
But purists consider the show sacrilegious, another example of what they say is catering to corporate interests by FIFA in a tournament hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico. It was expanded to 48 teams, featured abnormally high ticket prices and added mandatory hydration breaks that were used by some broadcasters to air advertisements.
Soccer is meant to be a continuous pressure-filled environment with minimal interruptions, said John Williams, a sports sociologist in Britain. Fans expect discussion of formations and fitness while players are recuperating during a Sunday afternoon halftime break, not a star-studded concert.
“It will just change the whole character of the event,” Williams said. “It won’t feel right.”
Guy Carrington, a producer at Done+Dusted, a live entertainment event company helping to produce the halftime spectacle, said preparations for the show had been an exercise in restraint.
“This is about creating an entertaining halftime show,” Carrington said, “but it’s also about doing it within the boundaries and to make sure it doesn’t feel out of place, and that it leaves the pitch exactly as we found it.”
To protect the field at New York New Jersey Stadium (the temporarily renamed MetLife Stadium), Carrington said, workers will cover it with a tarp and roll out stages with a small number of carts. Organizers have previously tested the remote camera systems that will be used to film the show to ensure they will not leave indentations on the field for Lionel Messi and Mikel Oyarzabal.
Carrington, who helped produce BTS’s comeback concert this year, said the setup and teardown of the stages would be expedited. “It’s going to be quick,” he said.
The Super Bowl halftime break typically lasts about 25 minutes, with the performance taking between 12 and 14 minutes. The chief executive of Global Citizen, the charitable organization producing the halftime show, said Sunday’s performance would last 11 minutes; The Athletic reported that FIFA is anticipating that the entire halftime break will last about 20 minutes.
An extended halftime may even anger players and coaches. In 2024, Nestor Lorenzo, Colombia’s coach, criticized plans for a halftime show during the Copa América final, saying that additional time spent in the locker room could alter player routines.
“This could affect the players’ fitness,” he said in a news conference. “They could cool down too much. People don’t understand what it takes to reach those levels.”
No matter how long the show is, it is a creative challenge for the four headliners, who have 13 combined Grammy Awards and could each feasibly complete a solo show.
“Everyone will have their moment, but everybody will have their moment as they contribute to the bigger picture,” Carrington said. Shakira, who created the official World Cup song, “Dai Dai,” featuring Burna Boy, said that sharing the stage with Jennifer Lopez for the Super Bowl halftime show in 2020 had been instructive.
“These moments move incredibly fast, and every detail has to be intentional,” she said in a statement. “It’s not about fitting everything in — it’s about choosing the most impactful moments that people will remember and that will create history.”
FIFA and Global Citizen learned some lessons during a halftime show at last year’s Club World Cup final, also at the New Jersey stadium.
Organizers erected a stage in the stands to protect the grass playing surface for a performance by J Balvin, Tems, Doja Cat and Coldplay. But Hugh Evans, Global Citizen’s chief executive, said the show’s sightlines were poor for some spectators in the venue.
Evans said that he understood not everyone was excited by the prospect of this weekend’s halftime show but that he was optimistic it would be received well afterward.
“So long as our true north is clear, then we hope that everyone in the world will embrace that message,” Evans said.
The World Cup halftime show exists partly because of Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, who had the idea during the 2022 World Cup. Martin had curated events for Global Citizen, which organizes music festivals for charitable issues such as hunger and education, so he called Evans with his proposal. Global Citizen then presented it to Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, who greenlit the plan.
Martin selected the artists for the show and drove the creative direction. He declined to comment about the upcoming performance but said in an interview before last year’s Club World Cup that he enjoyed musical variety.
“The only criteria for me is, ‘Are the songs amazing?’” Martin said. “I love so many different artists, and I think as long as the music feels true and authentic, it doesn’t really matter what language or genre it is.”
Inserting a halftime show into a premium soccer match has angered many fans of the world’s most popular sport. In a survey of nearly 2,100 British residents, 55 percent said they felt negatively about a halftime show.
“It’s not even so much that people feel upset that the sport is changing, but that it’s not changing for a reason to make it better,” said Brenda Elsey, a professor at Hofstra University whose research specialty includes Latin American soccer. “It’s not changing at the behest of the majority of fans, it’s changing at the behest of commercial interest by a very few overlords.”
Evans has compared the show to the 1985 Live Aid charity concerts in Philadelphia and London, and he defended it by saying it would benefit a philanthropic fund-raising initiative that hopes to raise $100 million to expand children’s education and sports access. The artists will not be paid, Evans said.
A spokeswoman for Global Citizen said that 350 people, including the headliners, dancers, orchestra members and even Muppets characters, would participate in the show.
A large group of performers was chosen, Evans said, to be representative of a global audience.
“If someone were looking down from the universe on planet Earth and they looked at this 11 minutes,” Evans said, “they’d be like, ‘Wow, isn’t the world amazing?’”
