Shakira and Burna Boy drop ‘Dai Dai’ as 2026 FIFA World Cup official anthem

Shakira and Burna Boy have released ‘Dai Dai’, the official song of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The track pairs a Colombian artist whose past tournament anthem became one of the most-streamed songs ever recorded with a Nigerian star whose Afrobeats template now sets the rhythm of much of global pop. For FIFA, fielding a Spanish-language singer with a Lagos vocalist for its flagship summer is a statement: the soundtrack of a tournament held across three host countries cannot be Anglo by default.

‘Dai Dai’ is built around a chant — the title is an Italian-derived rallying cry, roughly ‘come on, come on’ — engineered to be sung by stadium crowds with no common tongue. The structure leans on call-and-response over a propulsive drum track that splits the difference between African communal percussion and the Latin pop scaffolding Shakira has been refining since ‘Hips Don’t Lie’. The opening seconds are wordless vocalization, designed for collective participation rather than passive listening. The chorus — ‘knew from the day you were born / here in this place, you belong’ — frames the tournament as a resilience story rather than a competitive one.

FIFA timed the release to land just before its bigger announcement: for the first time in tournament history, the World Cup final will feature a halftime show. Shakira, Madonna and BTS will headline an eleven-minute performance at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Coldplay’s Chris Martin is curating the show. The bookings stack three of the largest active fandoms on earth onto a single stage during the year’s most-watched single sporting event — an estimated global television audience larger than any Super Bowl.

For Shakira specifically, this is the fourth time her name has been attached to a World Cup. ‘Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)’ became the most-streamed song of 2010 and remained the most-watched FIFA-attached music video on YouTube for more than a decade. ‘La La La (Brazil 2014)’ and ‘Try Everything’ for the 2016 Zootopia soundtrack — the latter not officially World Cup-linked but trailing the same brand — were not as commercially durable. The Dai Dai release is a fourth attempt at recapturing what Waka Waka did culturally: an anthem that outlives the tournament window.

The choice of Burna Boy is strategically louder than it appears. Afrobeats is the fastest-growing genre on Spotify, and Burna Boy is currently its highest-charting global crossover artist. Pairing him with a Latin pop star, rather than the usual move of pairing both with an English-language headliner, signals a tournament willing to lean on a Global South production identity. The song will be available in every market Spotify and Apple Music serve, with no regional restrictions.

The skepticism layer is real. Eleven minutes is a tight format — the Super Bowl halftime show runs roughly thirteen — and stitching together three career catalogs from three different cultural registers in that window is a programming gamble. BTS, currently navigating member-by-member returns from mandatory military service, will need to confirm full-group availability for a July date. Past World Cup anthems have struggled to outlive their tournament — outside Waka Waka, none from the last five editions has held cultural weight after the trophy was lifted. And the ‘Dai Dai’ lyric line that fans are reading as a coded reference to Shakira’s ex-partner Gerard Piqué risks dragging tabloid attention onto what FIFA wants framed as a unity moment.

The World Cup final is scheduled for July 19 at MetLife Stadium. ‘Dai Dai’ is out now on all major streaming services. The official music video, filmed at Rio de Janeiro’s Maracanã Stadium with dancers in the colors of every participating nation, is scheduled to drop ahead of the tournament’s opening match in June.