According to Shakira, the most successful World Cup song of all time arrived in the form of divine intervention.
On holiday in 2009, the Colombian pop star was traipsing the grounds of her 12-acre luxury farmhouse in Uruguay, when she found herself “automatically” singing the first verse and chorus of an infectious Afropop melody. Only two hours away from the hallowed pitch of the inaugural World Cup, Shakira was certain she had an anthem that could unite the world: “It was like someone was dictating it from above.”
The result was “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)”—the official song of the 2010 World Cup, and easily the best-selling World Cup anthem of all time, topping the charts in 15 countries and reaching over 15 million downloads. Today, it’s widely regarded as one of the best World Cup songs in the tournament’s history, so fondly remembered that it reentered the charts during the 2022 World Cup in Qatar.
In recent years, despite the expansion of official music connected to the World Cup, no release has come close to Shakira’s commercial juggernaut, much less evoked a genuine sense of excitement and global connection. It could be that a fractured monoculture has completely altered what constitutes a global hit, or it could have something to do with the total sublimation of non-English music into the mainstream. But considering FIFA’s unrivaled resources and reach, the answer might be much simpler: the music sucks.
As FIFA has centralized the production of World Cup music, the tournament’s soundtrack has lapsed into globalized slop. While earlier iterations were loosely grounded in local music traditions of host nations, World Cup anthems now rotate through a decontextualized pastiche of world music, relying on an overused palette of recycled reggaeton, stilted rap, and decorative djembe. This pattern remains unbroken by FIFA’s latest official release for the 2026 World Cup—a languid collaboration between American country singer Jelly Roll and Mexican banda artist Carin León that fans likened to an AI-generated jingle for a truck commercial.
These tunes are meant to reflect FIFA’s concerted evolution and its ability to capture a globalized culture. But for many fans, World Cup music has been the latest in an array of the modern experiences to fall into a familiar narrative: things just aren’t quite the same anymore. Still, by sifting through the tournament’s sonic detritus, we might inch closer to understanding exactly what has changed in how FIFA envisions its world. If we close our eyes and press our ears into the Earth, what exactly does their world sound like?
In 1987, a group of white men—representatives from London’s independent music labels—gathered at a pub in London to redefine the world.
The locus of Western popular music was rapidly shifting, and in the afterglow of the reggae boom, American and British artists were increasingly experimenting with exotic textures and timbres. Although this generated interest from Western consumers in music from abroad, there was no existing convention that allowed customers to readily find this music in record stores. Confronting a dizzying range of everything from indigenous folk to commercial pop, the label representatives decided to keep it simple. Thus, the genre of “world” music was born.
Eased by relaxed borders and new multinational trade agreements, the circuitry of Western economics ushered in an era of unprecedented global connection. With the advent of the internet fostering a belief that humans could transcend the trappings of physical borders, the globalization of culture encouraged the idea that Western media would not only reach new audiences but perhaps that pop culture itself would shed its Western core.
It soon became clear that the promise of a globalized culture would not come easily. Nowhere was this more clear than in the “Latin Explosion,” the long-awaited and extremely hyped breakthrough of Latin music into the Western market. By the eighties, as major record labels started establishing their own Latin divisions, the search for a crossover hit reached a boiling point. Despite concerted promotional pushes, Latin stars weren’t landing with pop radio, where real money could be made. As patience started wearing thin, Tommy Mottola, CEO of Sony Music, realized it would take the weight of the world to spark this fuse.
By the time Ricky Martin was pitched to perform for the 1999 Grammys, he was already one of the most commercially successful pop stars in the world. Yet, according to Mottola, “there was tremendous resistance from the Grammys.”
“They did not want an ‘unknown’ to perform, yet [Ricky] had already sold 10 million copies of Vuelve worldwide. To me, that was absolutely unacceptable.”
After “heavily” voicing his opinion, Mottola managed to get Ricky on the program, but he only had one chance to get it right. That night, Ricky would not perform his international hit, “Maria,” or any of his other widely known Spanish songs. Instead, Ricky performed the English version of “La Copa de la Vida,” his chart-topping single, known globally as the official anthem of the 1998 FIFA World Cup.
With just a few movements of his hips and a flash of his boyish smile, Americans swooned, and the “Latin Explosion” was officially catalyzed. The World Cup anthem had finally opened the West to the sound of the rest of the world.
Music has always been a part of soccer’s broader culture. At first, it came from the stands. On the concrete terraces behind the goals of pitches, Scottish and English fans fostered a tradition of intimidation through chanting. These songs were often based on original compositions or war cries, dating back as far as the 1880s. But it wasn’t until European soccer spectators were exposed to their South American counterparts that football chants became a defining aspect of a global fan culture.
Around the time of the 1962 World Cup in Chile, the soundscape within soccer stadiums began to amplify. As the tournament expanded its reach through television broadcasts, European viewers witnessed the vibrancy of South American football fans, whose chants and music evolved into a more complex performance of masculinity and agency. Around that time, “El Rock del Mundial,” a surf rock tune independently produced by a local Chilean band for the tournament, became a hit across South America. Boosted by a nascent youth culture that was rabidly consuming rock and roll, FIFA designated the song as the first official World Cup song, and the modern football stadium began to drown in its sound.
Then, in 1974, an ambitious, decades-long agenda to single-handedly globalize soccer began in earnest. FIFA president João Havelange, elected through appeals to the organization’s members in the global south, explicitly reoriented the eurocentric sport into a vehicle for a global culture. This globalization was unilaterally implemented through extreme corporatization—Havelange oversaw the dubious expansion of sponsorships, broadcasting rights, and public relations to realize his own goal of “[selling] a product called football.”
FIFA only wrestled control over the production of World Cup music when it aligned with their profit agenda. Since 1990, FIFA has overseen the selection of an official anthem or song—sometimes both, though the difference is unclear—for the World Cup. As this music was increasingly recognized by companies, music executives, and FIFA itself as a lucrative cultural force, the volume of music has accelerated, sometimes released in connection to other brands, networks, or countries. For Dr. Perry Johnson, professor and co-leader of a music in sports research collective called Sound of Victory, the diffusion of these music releases and their stylistic tendencies is directly related to FIFA’s desire to create global “spectacle”:
The World Cup is like a series of moments, and each of those moments become opportunities for networks or streaming platforms or advertisers. It’s all of the production around these events that really galvanizes this sense of showmanship. It’s about creating a moment of entertainment, of which sports only happens to be an essential part, but is always imagined as only a part of the broader spectacle. If the World Cup or the Super Bowl was just about sports, it would look very differently than it ends up looking to us, because [FIFA] sees it as a highly produced moment.
It is this desire for spectacle—this greed to create “the greatest event in human history, the greatest event that humanity will ever witness”—where the music of the World Cup collapses in on itself.
As globalization accelerated through the turn of the century, partially buttressed by cultural fronts like soccer, the promises of universal global citizenship never quite arrived (at least, as they were imagined). Time has made it clear that the project of globalization is one and the same as the movement of global capital. Yet, the political imaginary of FIFA—and its economic viability—are premised on this outdated philosophy, ceaselessly urging that soccer and music can still suspend history and unite the world. The ideological tension has come to a head in the 2026 World Cup, played in the world’s imperial core, where freedom of movement is restricted by socioeconomic standing, empire and aggression govern the logic of its most powerful men, and media and misinformation have splintered our collective realities. It’s never been harder to sustain a politics of globalization.
These discrepancies between FIFA’s global imaginary and reality are revealed in its music. Where World Cup music once claimed to represent the globe through a showcase of diversity, its latest anthems seem to recoil in fear, retreating to FIFA’s homogenous vision of a world that is increasingly removed from politics and reality. It’s this systematic defanging and diffusion that has hollowed any remaining spirit of World Cup music, its dissonance reverberating louder and louder with each iteration.
If we’re to believe Shakira, “Waka Waka” was a miracle, a border-crossing gift born at the height of global citizenship. Soon after the release of “Waka Waka,” the melody was recognized as an identical recreation of “Zamina Mina,” a huge hit from a Cameroonian band that was released in 1986. Even further, Freshlyground, the South African band featured on “Waka Waka,” revealed that little money from the song was actually given to African charities as initially promised. The lion’s share went to Shakira and the song’s producer, leaving exactly four percent to be split between Freshlyground’s seven-piece band.
Today, in the place of world music, a new era of “global pop” artists like BTS or KATSEYE have risen, though their music is entirely unburdened by context, quality, or tradition. The clinical vacancy of such “global pop” aligns closely with World Cup music, both rendering a colorless world in the name of rising above its complexities. Yet, it’s not the idea of the world itself that drains music or soccer of its color. Artists like M.I.A. or Baaba Maal created music that criss-crossed the globe with dutiful attention to its intricacies, envisioning a tender global community that only existed in response to this idea of the “world.”
If the “world” is a construction, as rich and real as we believe it to be, its sound is subject to the same collective interpretation. Yet, that malleability has made the world and its sound a tool for narrative control, in collusion with the worst abuses of power in our lifetimes. As the World Cup unfolds, soccer fans should listen carefully. As beating drums, drunken screams, and frenzied announcements of World Cup stadiums flood the air, we might find that FIFA’s imagination is comically small—that if you close your eyes and listen for the world, you’re more likely to hear this roar and not Nicki Minaj, Maluma, or Myriam Fares over a tabla.