Madonna entered the World Cup final through the underground tunnels, in a golf cart driven by Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. Eleven minutes later the whole thing was over: Madonna, Shakira, Justin Bieber, BTS, Burna Boy, Gustavo Dudamel, a children’s chorus and, for reasons history will have to explain, the Muppets. Spain and Argentina were in the locker rooms at 0-0. The second half kicked off on time.
Before the final I wrote a sceptical piece about this show. New scope at the point of maximum stakes, an untested system inside football’s unforgiving fifteen-minute window, and one question underneath it all: had anyone rehearsed the seams? It turns out the answer was yes. The rehearsal happened a year ago, at full scale, in the same building, and nobody called it a rehearsal.
Go back to July 2025. The Club World Cup final, also at MetLife, also produced with Global Citizen, also curated by Chris Martin. Doja Cat, Tems, J Balvin, a surprise Coldplay set, all delivered at halftime of a competitive final. And the design detail that made Sunday possible was already there: the stage sat in the upper stands, not on the pitch. Nothing built between halves. Nothing touching the grass. The tournament that half the football world dismissed as a Gianni Infantino vanity project was, among other things, a full-dress pilot of the most operationally risky element of the World Cup final.
Look at what that solved. The problem with a football halftime show was never talent. It was the window: fifteen minutes, governed by the laws of the game, with no stage-build time on either side. FIFA didn’t fight the constraint. It redesigned the deliverable so the constraint stopped mattering. Put the stage where it can live all match. Move the artists through service tunnels on golf carts. Write an eleven-minute show for a fifteen-minute half and bank the margin. Nobody extended halftime. Nobody gambled the pitch. The hard problem was quietly deleted at the design stage.
There are two lessons here and I’d hire anyone who has internalised both. The first: when a constraint is genuinely fixed, stop engineering around its edges and redesign the deliverable itself. The teams that suffer are the ones who accept the original design as given and then heroically fight the clock. Eurovision runs on the same principle. Front-load the danger out of the live moment entirely.
The second lesson is the pilot. A real one. Not a tabletop exercise, not a scale model, but the actual concept run under genuine conditions with a live audience and real consequences, twelve months before it mattered. Most organisations pilot in private, in sandboxes, with friendly users and nothing at stake, then act surprised when production behaves differently. FIFA piloted in public and let the world think it was just another tournament.
I stand by the scepticism. Adding scope at maximum stakes deserves scepticism. But the show ran under its window with the pitch untouched, and that outcome wasn’t luck or talent. It was a design decision made two years ago and a rehearsal disguised as a product. When your next high-stakes addition lands, ask where its Club World Cup is. If it doesn’t have one, build it.
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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