Justin Bieber Bowl? 5 Reasons FIFA’s World Cup Halftime Show Is a Bigger Stage Than the Super Bowl

Nothing about the July 19th halftime show is confirmed. That is worth saying plainly before anything else, because the noise around it has already starting to outpace the facts. FIFA have only confirmed Shakira, Madonna, and BTS as the names who will take centre-stage in its first Super Bowl-esque halftime show.

Despite the reports suggesting Justin Bieber has been lined up, his camp has made no statement.

Even so, the report from TMZ deserves more than a passing glance.

The World Cup Final has never had an in-match halftime show. Not once, in the tournament’s history.

What FIFA is building at MetLife Stadium is new infrastructure, modelled openly on the Super Bowl, and dropped into a sport that has spent a century treating the ninety minutes as sacred and untouchable.

That tension is real because football, as we know it, doesn’t do timeouts for entertainment. So, whoever fills that gap first isn’t just performing, they are setting precedent for what this moment becomes going forward.

Bieber’s name entering that conversation makes a certain kind of sense, and in this article, we examine five reasons why the FIFA World Cup halftime show could be a bigger stage than the Super Bowl for the Canadian pop icon.

The FIFA World Cup's comparison to the Super Bowl gets thrown around loosely, so it’s worth being precise about it. Super Bowl LX pulled a Nielsen-verified 125.6 million viewers in February, the second-largest audience in U.S. television history, and still, fundamentally, a domestic number.

Early reports indicated Bad Bunny's 2026 Super Bowl LX halftime show was poised to break all-time viewership records, with unofficial estimates suggesting over 135–142 million viewers, potentially surpassing the 2025 record of 133.5 million. 

However, the FIFA World Cup Final operates in a different category entirely, regularly clearing 1.5 billion viewers worldwide. That gap is already visible in what’s charting right now.

“Dai Dai,” Shakira and Burna Boy’s official tournament anthem, sits at No. 1 on Billboard’s Global Excl. U.S. chart and has climbed to No. 74 on the domestic Hot 100, a record built outside America outperforming most of what’s actually made there, weeks before the final has even been played. If a three-minute anthem can move numbers like that, an eleven-minute halftime set, should it happen, isn’t just competing with the Super Bowl’s number. It’s playing in a different arena altogether.

Any artist chosen for this slot has to clear a bar the Super Bowl doesn’t have to worry about: an audience that doesn’t share a first language, a home continent, or a football tradition. Pick someone whose fame is regionally locked, and the show reads as an American import, tacked onto someone else’s tournament.

Bieber’s career has been oddly built for the opposite problem. He broke as a global phenomenon before he was old enough to vote, and the fandom that followed him has never been geographically neat, it’s very loud. But that’s just the shape his career has always taken.

It is worth noting that Justin Bieber hasn’t toured properly in years. What’s replaced it is a string of short, controlled appearances, a Coachella set built around old YouTube clips, an NHL Draft cameo, a quiet VIP performance at the World Cup’s own opening ceremony last month.

When you look at each of those performances individually, they are curiosities. When you put them together, they look like a slow re-entry, an artist testing how much stage he can handle before deciding how much he wants. A World Cup Final halftime slot would answer that question definitively, on the largest platform available to answer it.

There’s another layer, too. Bieber isn’t just a global pop star, he’s Canadian. With Canada serving as one of the three host nations alongside the United States and Mexico, a Bieber halftime show would carry a degree of home-region symbolism without feeling parochial. FIFA wouldn’t be booking a local act for a local audience; it would be putting one of the host nations’ most recognizable cultural exports on the world’s biggest stage.

Halftime shows live or die on recognition speed. There’s simply no room for a set that needs explaining. Bieber’s discography solves that cleanly: 'Baby' and 'Never Say Never' reaches one generation, 'Sorry' and 'Peaches' reach another, and none of it requires context. That’s rarer than it sounds. Most artists his age have a catalog split cleanly by era, appealing to whoever discovered them first. However, Justin Bieber's catalogue doesn’t fracture that way.

This is the part of the story that matters most, and it has nothing to do with Bieber specifically. His catalog already includes songs with three Nigerian Grammy winners: 'Loved By You' with Burna Boy, 'Essence' with Wizkid and Tems, 'Attention' with Omah Lay. 'Loved By You' has always sounded built for a Burna Boy verse that deserved a live rendition.

And any stripped-down moment in an eleven-minute set is exactly the kind of space Wizkid and Tems have made her signature. If any of those collaborations happen on that stage, it puts Afrobeats inside the first in-match halftime show in World Cup history, not a ceremonial guest slot, but the actual centerpiece of the broadcast.

There’s a lineage worth remembering here. In 2022, Davido became the first Nigerian artist to perform on a World Cup stage, closing out the Qatar tournament with “Hayya Hayya (Better Together)” in front of 88,000 fans at Lusail.

There was no halftime show to headline back then, the closing ceremony was the biggest platform the tournament offered, and OBO took it. Four years later, the platform is bigger, and Afrobeats has a claim to a piece of it.

If it happens, this wouldn’t be a cameo riding someone else’s spotlight. It would be the genre stepping fully into the main event, on a stage that didn’t exist the last time an African artist made World Cup history.

Whether Justin Bieber ultimately headlines FIFA’s first World Cup Final halftime show remains to be seen. What’s already clear is that the stage itself has changed. Whoever becomes the first artist to walk into that moment won’t just be performing between two halves of football’s biggest match, they’ll be defining the future of the World Cup as a global entertainment spectacle.