It’s a Crowded and Contested World Cup Halftime Show

The official rules of soccer could not be much clearer: “Players are entitled to an interval at halftime, not exceeding 15 minutes.”

And the lineup for Sunday’s inaugural halftime show at a World Cup final could not be much fuller: Madonna, Justin Bieber, Shakira and BTS as headliners, plus Burna Boy, a Staten Island elementary school chorus and the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel.

Get ready for tradition to be tested.

FIFA, the World Cup’s organizing body, approved a halftime show in hopes it would attract more casual fans during a championship match between Spain and Argentina that is expected to exceed more than one billion viewers — five times the audience of the Super Bowl.

Guy Carrington, a producer at Done+Dusted, a live entertainment event company helping to produce the halftime spectacle, said preparations for the show had been an exercise in restraint.

“This is about creating an entertaining halftime show,” Carrington said, “but it’s also about doing it within the boundaries and to make sure it doesn’t feel out of place, and that it leaves the pitch exactly as we found it.”

To protect the field at New York New Jersey Stadium (the temporarily renamed MetLife Stadium), Carrington said, workers will cover it with a tarp and roll out stages with a small number of carts. Organizers have previously tested the remote camera systems that will be used to film the show to ensure they will not leave indentations on the field for Lionel Messi and Mikel Oyarzabal.

Read the full article on the New York Times