The Score To Sport's Biggest Event

Every 4 years, the FIFA World Cup comes around to remind us that it's the reigning champion of televised events, pulling in upwards of 1.5 billion viewers each time. Music has always been central to the collective conversations that surround each event and its overall longevity in the cultural conversation, serving as a unifying anthem for the event and the host nation at large.

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This year is different: when faced with the challenge of representing sixteen host cities across three vastly different nations, FIFA Sound opted to exceed their usual two official anthems, releasing a whopping 18-track album in an attempt to appeal to every market. This not only waters down the memorability of their own identity and presence in the cultural moment, but fails to tread any genuinely new and exciting ground, which all great World Cup anthems tend to do.

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Take the ever-enduring 'Waka Waka' by Shakira. Born out of the 2010 World Cup, the song saw host nation South Africa leverage international stardom and home-grown songwriting and production to deliver a unique cultural blend so persistent through the decades that it stands among the 1000 or so members of Spotify's elite Billions Club. So persistent that Shakira is back in 2026 to deliver another anthem for the sporting event.

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Her return this time round comes in the form of  "Dai Dai," a collaboration with Burna Boy and the official song of the tournament. The rest of the track list is stacked with international talent — from LISA to Tyla to British native 21 Savage — as well as local talent from all three host nations. There’s even a track from Twitch streamer IShowSpeed. Across eighteen feature packed songs and dozens of genres, the 2026 Official World Cup album is, by FIFA's own framing, the biggest music project the tournament has ever assembled. And while this magnitude of scale is certainly the point, it’s also, arguably, the problem.

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Compare that firehose approach to what FIFA Sound did with the tournament's actual sonic identity, released not weeks before kickoff but three years out, in May 2023, alongside the visual "26" logo itself. The Official FIFA World Cup 26 Theme was designed to function the way all good sonic logos should: a short, consistent, recognizable motif that cuts through the noise surrounding it. The cultural diversity found across the host cities is then highlighted by sixteen different local producers, who each remix the same mnemonics into a city-specific Sonic ID. One melodic seed given sixteen distinct regional translations, rolled out one city a day for over two weeks in March 2025.

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It’s a much more engaging product and rollout, and one that actually solves the problem the 18-track album is straining against. A single global anthem can't carry the weight of three countries and 48 teams without flattening the culturally significant sub-genres it would inevitably pull from — the Sonic ID system, however, has its cake and eats it. It uses one unifying signature that stays legible as "the World Cup" no matter where you hear it, but leverages remixes as a means to let each city, and by extension culture, put its stamp on the overall sonic identity of the event.

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None of this is to say the 2026 Official album will flop — on the contrary, ‘Dai Dai’ sits at number 1 on both the Billboard and Spotify Global charts. Streaming numbers don’t punish abundance the way cultural memory does, and while the song is surely having its moment, it doesn’t feel monumental. “Waka Waka" didn't work because it was one competent song among many, it worked because there was nothing else competing for the same two minutes of the world's attention. And while FIFA successfully managed to capture the world’s attention with their sonic logo and the surrounding remixes, their 18-track album seems fated to be forgotten.

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