Shakira returns: FIFA names Colombian star as official voice of the 2026 World Cup

FIFA announced on 7 May 2026 that Colombian pop star Shakira will perform the official song for this year's expanded World Cup, a decision that draws directly on her history with the tournament and the commercial reach she demonstrated during her 2010 and 2014 appearances.

The official confirmation, reported first by BBC Sport, places Shakira at the centre of football's largest celebration as the event expands to 48 participating nations for the first time, with matches spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. It is a venue shift that also marks a geographical pivot toward North American commercial and broadcast infrastructure — a context that makes her appointment a deliberate signal about the tournament's global ambition.

A tournament's musical anchor

Shakira first performed at the World Cup in 2010, appearing at the Johannesburg opening ceremony with "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)" — a collaboration with South African group Freshlyground that became one of the best-selling singles in FIFA's history. Her second appearance came at the 2014 Brazil tournament, where she performed "La La La (Brazil)" during the closing ceremony. Both events generated broadcast audiences that exceeded many of the tournament's own matches in some markets, a metric FIFA has historically used when selecting its official artists.

The appointment comes as FIFA seeks to rebuild commercial momentum following a period that has included governance controversies, disputes over broadcast rights, and ongoing conversations about the tournament's expansion to a format that has strained the capacities of host cities and supporter groups alike. An official song, by definition, is a piece of ceremony management — a way of framing what the World Cup means to audiences who experience it primarily through television and digital platforms rather than stadiums.

Why Shakira, why now

The logic behind choosing Shakira is partly commercial and partly cultural. She brings to the table a bilingual audience base stretching from Latin America into Europe and North America — a demographic overlap that aligns with the 2026 host nations and the tournament's expanded pool of participating federations. FIFA has historically favoured artists with demonstrated capacity to sell merchandise, generate streaming traffic, and appear across multiple language markets without losing core identity.

Shakira meets those criteria in ways that more locally rooted performers do not. Her discography stretches across Spanish and English, her collaborations have included artists from Wyclef Jean to Beyoncé, and her public profile has remained high in part through sustained media attention to her personal life — a dynamic that has made her unusual among major pop performers in her ability to maintain chart relevance across multiple consecutive decades.

The 2026 tournament also creates a different logistical challenge than its predecessors. With matches distributed across three countries and a record number of participating teams, FIFA faces a coordination problem that an official song — distributed across broadcast, streaming, and social platforms — can partially address by providing a unifying cultural artefact. Shakira's existing relationship with the tournament gives that artefact an implicit historical weight it would not carry if the federation had chosen an artist without prior World Cup experience.

The commercial architecture around the anthem

FIFA's official song programme has evolved significantly since the early tournament years, when simple opening-ceremony performances sufficed. The 2026 edition will deploy the official track across a series of activation points: opening and closing ceremonies, broadcast package music, sponsorship fulfilment campaigns, and the federation's own social media channels. The commercial architecture around the song has become as important as the song itself — licensing agreements, streaming platform placement, and partnership tie-ins represent a revenue line that FIFA has increasingly formalised in recent tournament cycles.

Whether Shakira's track will match the commercial performance of "Waka Waka" depends on factors that are difficult to predict: the track's quality, the receptiveness of the tournament's younger audience demographics, and the degree to which FIFA's broadcast partners give the song prominent placement. What is clear is that the federation has chosen an artist whose past performance on these metrics is encouraging, if not guarantees a repeat outcome.

What this tells us about FIFA's direction

The Shakira appointment is also a statement about the kind of World Cup FIFA wants the 2026 tournament to be. A North American host bloc, an expanded field, a post-pandemic global audience with changed media consumption habits, and an ongoing effort to position the tournament against competing entertainment products — these pressures shape every major decision the federation makes in the run-up to June. The choice of an artist with genuine cross-cultural reach, established FIFA familiarity, and a demonstrated ability to translate football association into mainstream pop visibility reflects the federation's calculation that cultural legibility matters as much as commercial revenue in sustaining the World Cup's global position.

The song itself will debut in the weeks ahead, with FIFA expected to confirm a release date and performance schedule before the tournament's opening match on 11 June. Until then, the appointment is the news — and the news is that FIFA has decided its most valuable cultural property needs an experienced hand.

Shakira last performed a World Cup song at the 2014 Brazil closing ceremony in Rio de Janeiro. Her 2010 single "Waka Waka" sold more than seven million copies worldwide, according to available commercial reporting from the period.