Gianni Infantino has done a lot of things during his tenure as FIFA president that have raised eyebrows. He has expanded the World Cup to 48 teams. He has moved it to the middle of the Premier League season. He has launched the Club World Cup in a format nobody asked for and staged it in a country where the football culture is, to put it generously, still developing.
But this one genuinely stopped me in my tracks.
A halftime show at the World Cup final. Curated by Chris Martin and Coldplay. With multiple artists. The biggest in the world, apparently. Fantastic, apparently.
I will tell you what is fantastic. Two teams, the best players on the planet, ninety minutes, everything on the line, the whole world watching. That is fantastic. That has always been fantastic. It did not need fixing because it was never broken.
What FIFA Are Actually Proposing
To be clear about what is being suggested here, because it is worth letting it sink in properly.
Infantino confirmed in comments shared via Semafor that the 2026 World Cup final will feature a halftime show for the first time in the tournament’s history. Coldplay frontman Chris Martin is involved in curating the event, and Infantino teased that multiple artists will perform, describing it as the biggest halftime show the world has ever seen.
This is not a rumour or a leaked proposal. This is the FIFA president standing up and confirming that the World Cup final, the most sacred ninety minutes in world football, is getting a concert in the middle of it.
The 2026 World Cup takes place across the United States, Canada and Mexico. The final will be held at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. And if Infantino gets his way, sometime around the 45th minute, the players will trudge off the pitch and Chris Martin will walk on.
Take a moment with that image.
Why the World Cup Final Does Not Need This
The World Cup final is the most watched sporting event on the planet. Consistently. Every four years, billions of people stop whatever they are doing and watch two nations fight for the biggest prize in football. No marketing campaign, no celebrity endorsement, no halftime entertainment has ever been responsible for that. The football is responsible for that.
Think about the finals that live in the collective memory. France versus Brazil in 1998. Italy versus France in 2006, defined by a moment of madness in extra time that the world is still talking about two decades later. Germany versus Argentina in 2014, settled by a single goal with ten minutes of extra time remaining. Argentina versus France in 2022, arguably the greatest final ever played, a match of such extraordinary drama and quality that it needed nothing else around it to be remembered forever.
Not one of those matches needed a halftime show. Not one of those moments would have been enhanced by a pop concert between the two halves. The football provided everything. It always does.
The World Cup final does not have an audience problem. It does not have a reach problem. It does not have an engagement problem. It has none of the problems that a halftime show is designed to solve. So the only honest question is why FIFA feels the need to introduce one.
The Super Bowl Comparison and Why It Does Not Work
Infantino and his colleagues will point to the Super Bowl. They always do. The Super Bowl halftime show is a global cultural event in its own right. Beyonce, Prince, Shakira, Jennifer Lopez, Eminem. Hundreds of millions of viewers tune in specifically for the performance. It works. Nobody is disputing that.
But the Super Bowl works as a halftime show vehicle for a very specific reason that has nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with sport. American football has a natural halftime break of approximately thirty minutes built into the structure of the game. The two halves are separated by a significant pause that exists regardless of whether there is entertainment or not. The halftime show fills time that was always going to be there.
Football does not work that way. The halftime interval in football is fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes in which players recover, managers deliver team talks, tactical adjustments are made and the shape of the second half is determined. It is not dead time. It is one of the most important fifteen minute periods in the entire match.
Cramming a concert into that window does one of two things. Either it shortens the interval that players and managers depend on, which is absurd, or it extends it significantly, which disrupts the rhythm of the match and the experience of watching it. Neither option is acceptable. Neither option has been properly thought through.
The Super Bowl comparison does not hold because the sports are fundamentally different. Importing an American entertainment format into a sport with a completely different structure and rhythm is not innovation. It is a failure to understand what you are actually dealing with.
What This Is Really About
Let us be honest about what is actually driving this decision because it has very little to do with enhancing the experience of watching football.
The 2026 World Cup is being staged in North America in significant part to grow the game’s commercial footprint in the United States ahead of a market that FIFA has identified as its biggest untapped revenue source. American sports culture is built around entertainment as much as sport. The Super Bowl halftime show, the NBA All Star weekend, the elaborate pre-game ceremonies, all of it speaks to an audience that expects spectacle alongside competition.
FIFA is not introducing a halftime show because football fans around the world have been asking for one. Football fans around the world have not been asking for one. FIFA is introducing a halftime show because it wants to sell the World Cup final to an American entertainment audience that responds to this kind of production.
That is a commercial calculation dressed up as a gift to football supporters. And Infantino’s language around it, biggest in the world, fantastic, curated, reflects the vocabulary of someone who thinks about the World Cup as a content property rather than a sporting event.
This is the same logic that gave us a 48 team World Cup that dilutes the group stage to the point of irrelevance. The same logic that moved the tournament to Qatar in winter and disrupted every domestic league on the planet. The same logic that invented a Club World Cup and staged it in the middle of an already congested calendar.
Every single one of those decisions was presented as progress. Every single one of them was primarily about money.
Leave It Alone
The World Cup final is ninety minutes of football. Possibly one hundred and twenty. Potentially a penalty shootout that will have every person watching barely able to breathe. It is tense, dramatic, beautiful and completely self-contained. It does not need an interval concert to make it more watchable. It does not need Chris Martin to make it more meaningful.
What it needs is to be left alone.
There are things in football that do not need improving because they are already as good as sport gets. The World Cup final is one of them. Gianni Infantino adding a halftime show does not make it bigger. It makes it smaller. It signals to every football fan in the world that the people running the game do not fully understand what makes it special.
The beautiful game does not need a support act. It never did.
