That focus-grouped vibe was, in all likelihood, precisely what the organizers were going for. This year’s North American World Cup saw no shortage of controversy, from substantive conflicts like the reversal of U.S. striker Folarin Balogun’s red card after a phone call by Donald Trump and the tight restrictions American officials placed on the Iranian team to the sideshow that was frugal fans’ idea to avoid high transit costs by walking from New York City to matches in New Jersey. Casual viewers might presume that a halftime show promoted as a celebration of “football, music and our shared values” would be considered the tournament’s least divisive element. In fact, as the first performance of its kind—and one that seemed impossible to pull off within soccer’s customary 15-minute halftime break—the show faced quite a bit of advance backlash. (The Cure frontman Robert Smith summed up many fans’ attitudes about it, going into the final, when he wrote in an Instagram post: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH…”)
Cookie Monster, Elmo, Chris Martin, and the P.S. 22 chorus —Carl Recine/Getty Images
But that’s not the same as making them all make sense together in one 11-minute show. Halftime opened with Madonna singing her Y2K hit “Music” amid dancers decked out to look like skaters and/or revelers at some kind of underground club—a safe but solid, vintage-Madge start. Almost immediately after she parked her dune buggy and walked out into the stadium, flanked by Brazilian soccer icons Ronaldinho and Ronaldo, the scene shifted. As a giant ground covering with a rainbow-colored globe at its center stretched out across the field, Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel led the New York Philharmonic, the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, and, why not, the Muppets in an instrumental rendition of the White Stripes hit turned jock jam “Seven Nation Army.” Then, suddenly, members of BTS started showing up in red, black, and white, to serenade the masses with their international smash “Dynamite” as dancers fanned out around them and lyrics flashed across screens in the stands.
It was certainly an improvement over the halftime show at last year’s Club World Cup—which took place at the same venue, was also curated by Martin, and featured J. Balvin and Doja Cat—which was widely seen as a dry run for Sunday’s event. Set on a stage at the very highest level of the stands, that similarly crowded performance looked like a Grammys medley on video but must have resembled ants scurrying around a screensaver to much of the in-person audience. This one was clearly conceived with both TV audiences and the people who paid thousands to be in the stadium in mind, even if its tie-dye-tarp aesthetic was kind of hokey.
From an artistic perspective, though, the halftime show did so much that it ended up saying nothing. Compare it to Bad Bunny’s personal, culturally specific, politically resonant, and wildly entertaining Super Bowl performance, and FIFA’s first World Cup final entertainment interlude comes out looking like a commercial for some undated edition of the Now That’s What I Call Music! compilation series. Which is, of course, to be expected of a production charged with representing the whole world and not making anyone mad. Now that’s what I call a letdown.
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