For 96 years, halftime at a World Cup final meant fifteen minutes of oranges and tactics. On Sunday it means Madonna, Justin Bieber, Shakira, BTS, Burna Boy, Gustavo Dudamel and Coldplay with a school choir, on a stage that doesn’t exist at kickoff and must vanish before the second half.
FIFA has bolted a Super Bowl-style halftime show onto the biggest match in world football, for the first time in the tournament’s history. Consider what that sentence contains. A brand-new, never-rehearsed-at-a-World-Cup piece of scope, inserted into the single highest-stakes moment of a seven-year program, in a window football never designed for entertainment.
The Super Bowl earned its halftime spectacle over decades, and the NFL bent the sport around it. American football’s halftime stretches close to half an hour on the big day, and the league has sixty years of muscle memory in stage builds, pyro clearances and pitch protection. Football’s halftime is fifteen minutes, governed by the laws of the game and two managers who will not wait for a lighting rig. Every second of stage-in and stage-out comes from a budget that was never designed to fund it.
This is the kind of decision that lands on delivery teams everywhere. Leadership adds the exciting thing late, precisely because the moment is big. The product launch gains a live demo the week before. The AGM gains a surprise announcement. The go-live gains an executive walkthrough. Visibility attracts scope the way porch lights attract moths, and the scope always arrives at the point where the tolerance for error is lowest.
You usually can’t refuse it. What you can do is rehearse it, and when the real thing can’t be rehearsed, you rehearse the seams. The stage build has been drilled somewhere, timed to the second. The handoffs between show and sport, who owns the pitch at minute twelve, who calls it if the build runs long, what happens to the broadcast if the teams are ready and the stage isn’t. Eurovision taught me the same lesson from another angle: great live events front-load the hard work out of the live moment. And FIFA already learned this tournament what happens when a sensible decision meets real conditions untested.
Maybe it comes off perfectly and becomes tradition by 2030. The performers are professionals and the production company will have modelled every minute. But if the second half kicks off late because a stage wheel jammed, remember it wasn’t the wheel. It was a scope decision, made in a boardroom, that put an untested system inside an unforgiving window.
When the exciting late addition lands on your project, ask the FIFA question. Not whether it will be brilliant. Whether the seams have been rehearsed.
Ben Webb is an Australian project manager and event delivery strategist. He was named AIPM Project Manager of the Year in 2022 and nominated for IPMA World Project Manager of the Year in 2023. He writes about project management, event delivery and leadership at benwebb.au.
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