From Soweto to the Azteca: African music takes the World Cup stage again

When the 2026 World Cup opened in Mexico City on June 11, the voice carrying the tournament's official song belonged, in part, to Lagos. Burna Boy stood alongside Shakira at the Estadio Azteca to debut "Dai Dai," the official song of the tournament, before a global audience in the hundreds of millions. Moments earlier, South Africa's Tyla had sung her national anthem as her country's team prepared to face the hosts.

It was a striking amount of African presence on the world's largest sporting stage, and FIFA leaned into it. Tyla is the only artist booked to perform across two of the three opening ceremonies, Mexico City and Los Angeles, positioned as a thread connecting continents. Nigeria's Rema joins the Los Angeles lineup. Afrobeats and African pop, once on the margins of these global moments, now sit close to the centre of them.

There is a longer line behind this. In 2010, the World Cup was hosted on African soil for the first time, and its opening concert in Soweto gathered the continent's own, Angélique Kidjo, Vusi Mahlasela, Tinariwen, on home ground. Sixteen years on, the stage is someone else's, North America's, and African artists are there not as hosts but as headliners and anthem-bearers, invited to help open the show. That is a different kind of arrival, and arguably a harder-won one.

It is worth marking the moment for what it is: not the first time African music has shaped a World Cup, but a sign of how far its reach now travels, onto stages the continent does not own, in front of audiences it does not have to host to command.