๐ฑ The World Cup Anthem Has Always Come From the Top. This Summer, It Came From Below. — Woody Magazine, Jun. 20, 2026
The World Cup Anthem Has Always Come From the Top. This Summer, It Came From Below.
FIFA never commissioned the song. A 21-year-old streamer’s fan track climbed onto the official album anyway.
Half the planet is listening to the same music right now. The World Cup that opened on June 11 runs through July 19, and an 18-track official album fills the stadiums, the broadcasts, and the public viewing squares between matches — the largest music project ever built around the tournament, by Billboard’s count. Listen closely to those 18 songs, though, and one of them doesn’t belong.
To see why, start with how an official song gets chosen. For decades, the World Cup anthem has, as a rule, traveled from the top down. FIFA partners with a host-nation label and a global music company, then hands the job to a hand-picked star. This year’s official song is “Dai Dai,” released on May 15 by Shakira and Burna Boy — Shakira being the star who gave the World Cup “Waka Waka” back in 2010. A commissioned, top-down pick, start to finish.
And that seat is narrower than most people assume. According to ESPN, FIFA only began formally branding a track as the “official song” at Italia ’90 — and in the 36 years since, just ten songs have earned the stamp. Not everything gets to be official.
This summer, someone walked through that narrow door in exactly the wrong direction. IShowSpeed — real name Darren Watkins Jr., 21, a streamer best known for his devotion to Cristiano Ronaldo — dropped “World Cup (Champions)” on June 1. Nobody at FIFA asked him to. He made it as a fan, the way a fan would, rattling off the competing nations from the opening bars. It landed precisely where fans live.
The response was instant. Within days the track cleared tens of millions of plays across YouTube, TikTok, and X. Then came the part no commissioning process could have scripted: Speed tagged FIFA directly and asked them to make it official. FIFA answered with a curt “we’ll be in touch,” and on June 3 they added the song to the official album. No brief, no audition, no label meeting. A song that rose from below pulled the “official” stamp down toward it.
This isn’t even his first World Cup song. Speed released “World Cup” before the 2022 tournament in Qatar, and it became a viral monster — its video north of 200 million YouTube views as of May 2026. Yet that one never made FIFA’s official album; it stayed firmly unofficial. The same person returned to the same threshold four years later, and this time the ending flipped.
What makes the reversal matter is that “official” and “the song people sing” have so often pointed in different directions. ESPN notes that many of the post-1990 official picks vanished from memory almost as soon as they were released. As NPR explains, FIFA actually splits its music into the crowd-pleasing “song” and the more ceremonial “anthem” — and it is almost always the former that endures. “Waka Waka” is the case in point: it became the tournament’s de facto anthem in the popular sense, yet even it drew fire for letting a non-African artist carry an African tournament’s tune. Stamping a song official, it turns out, never compelled anyone to love it.
So this isn’t really the story of a famous streamer scoring a hit. It’s a moment when the question of who gets to make a World Cup’s soundtrack official tilted in a direction it rarely, if ever, has before. On one side: FIFA’s machinery of labels and global stars. On the other: a 21-year-old who uploaded a song from his phone and simply asked to be let in. This time, the second one opened the door.
And the stamp didn’t tidy everything up. “Champions” is a Warner Records release, so the moment it lands on the official album, it raises rights-and-revenue questions a commissioned track wouldn’t. It reads less like a plan than like an institution retrofitting itself around something that bubbled up from outside.
That’s why the real story isn’t that Speed went official. It’s that the “official” stamp changed jobs. It used to come first — FIFA picked the song, and the world listened along behind it. This summer the order reversed: a fan made the track, the crowd pushed it up, and FIFA ratified what had already happened. The stamp didn’t pick the song. It chased the song down and landed on it.
- Source ↗ FIFA — Official 2026 World Cup album announcement
- Source ↗ NPR — Official song ‘Dai Dai’ and the song-vs-anthem distinction
- Source ↗ ESPN — Ranking the 10 official FIFA World Cup songs
- Source ↗ Wikipedia — World Cup (Champions): release and album inclusion
- Source ↗ Billboard — The Best 2026 World Cup Songs (18-track album)
- Source ↗ Sportskeeda — IShowSpeed’s 2022 ‘World Cup’: views and unofficial status
๋๊ธ
๋๊ธ ์ฐ๊ธฐ