On 12 June, inside a VIP area at Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium, Justin Bieber picked up a microphone and sang “Yukon” from his recent album Swag. The private set, captured on video and shared widely, unfolded hours before the opening match of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, where the singer and his wife Hailey were among the celebrity guests.

Now, according to a report by TMZ, FIFA is in active talks with Bieber to join the halftime show of the World Cup final on 19 July at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. The performance, curated by Coldplay’s Chris Martin, already features Shakira, Madonna and the South Korean group BTS. It marks the first time a World Cup final will include a musical interval, with the break likely to extend beyond the customary 15 minutes into a Super Bowl-style spectacle.

The move mirrors a broader blurring of lines between sport and entertainment. Madonna headlined the Super Bowl halftime show in 2012; Shakira co-headlined in 2020 with Jennifer Lopez. Shakira, a four-time World Cup performer, also sang at the 2026 opening ceremony in Mexico City alongside Burna Boy. For Bieber, a confirmed appearance would cap a cautious return to live performance after a four-year hiatus to address Ramsay Hunt Syndrome, which caused partial facial paralysis. His April set at Coachella, his first solo show before a large crowd since 2022, drew a reported 125,000 people and featured stripped-down renditions of early hits.

The final is the most-watched sporting event globally; FIFA says the 2022 decider reached nearly 1.5 billion viewers. The halftime show, produced in partnership with Global Citizen, aims to raise $100 million for the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund, which supports access to education and football for children worldwide. The choice of artists reflects a calculated appeal to distinct fan ecosystems: Shakira’s Latin American and global pop following, Madonna’s cross-generational icon status, BTS’s fervent K-pop army, and Bieber’s own durable teen-idol-turned-adult fanbase. If the deal is sealed, the image of Bieber singing softly for a few hundred VIPs in California will be replaced by one of him performing for a stadium of 82,500 and a television audience in the hundreds of millions, under the lights of a New Jersey evening.