Shakira delivers World Cup 2026 anthem as three-nation tournament looms

Miami, in late May, smells of salt and jet fuel. The Copa América is three weeks away; the Gold Cup a month after that; the World Cup, the one FIFA is billing as the largest in history, is twelve months from its opening whistle in Mexico City. Somewhere between those three dates sits a Colombian pop star, a recording studio, and the question of what a tournament spread across three nations, forty-eight teams, and sixteen host cities actually sounds like.

Shakira, the BBC reports, has unveiled “Let’s Go,” her official anthem for the 2026 World Cup^{T2, BBC Football}. It is her third FIFA tournament song, after “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” at the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and “La La La (Brazil 2014),” which was released alongside a second version following the tournament. The new track arrives twelve months before the first ball is kicked, a longer runway than either predecessor had, and into a media landscape that has changed considerably since 2014.

The choice of Shakira is, in one sense, obvious. She is the most commercially successful Latin artist of her generation, fluent in Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Arabic, with a discography that straddles pop, rock, and reggaeton in a way that maps reasonably well onto the linguistic geography of a tournament hosted by the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Her previous World Cup songs have accumulated, between them, several billion streams across platforms. FIFA’s commercial logic is not complicated.

In another sense, the choice is a statement about what this particular World Cup is meant to be. The 2026 tournament is the first to feature forty-eight teams, the first to be hosted across three countries, and the first to stage matches in sixteen cities spread across four time zones. The logistical ambition is enormous; the cultural brief, at least as FIFA has articulated it, is to produce a tournament that feels like a continental event rather than a national one. A Colombian artist performing a multilingual anthem for a tournament anchored in North America, with fixtures in Guadalajara, Toronto, New Jersey, and Los Angeles, is not a coincidence. It is a brand alignment.

Shakira’s relationship with tournament football is older than her official soundtrack credits. She performed at the 2006 World Cup closing ceremony in Berlin, sang at the Champions League final in 2010, and has been, for the better part of two decades, the default answer when a football governing body needs a song that plays in stadiums and on highlight reels across every continent simultaneously. The role is a strange one. A World Cup anthem is not quite a pop single and not quite a jingle; it has to work in a stadium bowl, on a thirty-second television montage, and as a standalone piece of music. Very few songs manage all three.

“Waka Waka” managed it. The 2010 track, built around a Cameroonian military marching song and performed in a mix of English and Spanish, became the best-selling World Cup single of the century. It was also the subject of a persistent cultural argument: about whether a Colombian artist was the right voice for an African World Cup, about the borrowing of Cameroonian melody, about the gap between FIFA’s branding exercises and the host nation’s own musical traditions. The debate was serious and unresolved. It did not prevent the song from becoming ubiquitous.

“Let’s Go” will face a different kind of scrutiny. The 2010 song had a clear host continent and a single cultural reference point. The 2026 tournament has neither. The United States, Mexico, and Canada are three nations with distinct musical traditions, from country to cumbia to Canadian indie rock, none of which are easily collapsed into a single three-minute track. The challenge for Shakira and her production team is to produce something that sounds like North America in 2026 without sounding like a tourism advertisement for any one of its constituent parts.

Whether the song succeeds in that task will be measured, as all World Cup anthems are measured, not by critics but by crowds. The first real test will come at the opening ceremony in Mexico City on 11 June 2026, when eighty-seven thousand people in the Estadio Azteca hear it for the first time live. By then, the forty-eight qualified teams will have arrived, the training camps will be open, and the tournament will have begun to acquire the texture that only exists once football replaces branding as the primary content. Shakira’s song will be the soundtrack to that transition, the last piece of pre-tournament theatre before the thing itself begins.

FIFA has not confirmed whether “Let’s Go” will be performed live at the opening ceremony. Given the song’s early release and the twelve-month promotional window, a performance in Mexico City seems probable. What is certain is that, by June 2026, the song will be everywhere, in broadcasts, in stadiums, in the ears of people who do not follow football and will hear it anyway. That is the function of a World Cup anthem: to be inescapable, to compress a tournament into a melody, to do the work of memory before memory has anything to hold onto.