I listened to the Official FIFA World Cup 2026 Album so you don't have to - and you really shouldn't

Many years ago, before I became a full-time football journalist, I dabbled in music criticism for a handful of publications and websites. This has now come back to haunt me, as I find myself compelled by my editor to listen to and review the freshly-released official 2026 World Cup album, imaginatively titled Official FIFA World Cup 2026 Album, which released on Friday 5 June ahead of the tournament.

Plenty of great music has been inspired by football, of course. But will we find any of it here, on this hour-long, 18-track compilation which consists largely of collaborative efforts from artists ranging from Stormzy and Shakira to Jelly Roll and The Rolling Stones? Take a wild guess.

The Official FIFA World Cup 2026 Album reviewed

To be fair to exactly one of the tracks on this record, the Official FIFA World Cup 2026 Album actually starts in reasonably promising fashion. ‘Goals,’ led by Lisa (best known as a member of wildly successful K-Pop band Blackpink) rumbles its way through trap-inspired electro with a surprising amount of verve. It has just enough foot-tapping fizz about it to suggest that this endeavour will be worthwhile. It lies.

The rest of the album is a mess of over-produced electro-pop and milksop hip-hop tunes which sound less like they were written than developed by an algorithm which was programmed to maximise appeal to the younger generation without taking the slightest risk of offending anybody else at all. The result is something so drab, so bland, so soulless, that it ends up being very offensive to the ears indeed.

The theoretical big hitters here are ‘Dai Dai,’ the utterly forgettable official song of the tournament from Shakira and Burna Boy, and ‘Lighter,’ an achingly American, stomp-clapping chunk of overpolished country-pop by Jelly Roll and Carín León. The former sounds as though its producers were instructed to surgically extract any sense of fun from it, and the latter like it belongs on an advert for a Ford pick-up truck, probably being driven through the Arizona desert by a man in a Stetson. Neither sets the pulse racing.

This record is largely an indistinguishable sludge of identikit, artless pap which would be more at home as hold music than it would at any kind of party in any part of the world. Clearly constructed with excessive corporate oversight, it even goes as far as to feature a track by the breathtakingly irritating streamer iShowSpeed, ‘Champion,’ presumably because market researched indicated that his presence would increase sales to the 16-21 market.

He certainly can’t rap worth a damn, and the most notable aspect of his shouty, kitchen-sink contribution to the album is that it appears to be the only track to actually mention the World Cup, or indeed football in any capacity, although the World Cup would probably prefer it if iShowSpeed took its name out of his mouth.

The album’s lowest point, however, the deepest dip in a wholly featureless valley, comes courtesy of a dire remix of a new Rolling Stones song, ‘In The Stars,’ in which a grandfatherly riff is rehashed into a mindlessly generic dance track that no club with any sense of self-respect would ever permit a DJ to play.

It’s so execrable that I was reminded of stories about the CIA using the music of Iron Maiden to torture detainees at Guantánamo Bay in the 2000s. I would confess to absolutely anything before the five endless minutes of ‘In The Stars’ were up. I would commit almost any crime just to make it stop. I will almost certainly not listen to anything worse this year.

Who is the official World Cup album for? It’s hard to be sure

Beyond that, this album isn’t so much painfully bad as stultifyingly dull. Most of the vocalists involved sound bored even through the excessive auto tune. Ava Max & BIA’s ‘Energy’ has precious little of it, while 21 Savage manages to sound like he’s been mildly distracted from doing the hoovering as he tells us about the “thrill of the fight/thrill of the rage/crushing my opponents" on ‘Three Nations.’ This is an album almost completely devoid of passion, 18 tracks put together by artists collecting a nice easy paycheque.

The real question this album begs is: Who is this actually for? Because it certainly isn’t for football fans. As mentioned above, football doesn’t even get a mention beyond iShowSpeed’s effort and the string of inevitable, half-hearted allusions to people generically being champions, beating the opposition, and so on.

There is not a single track here which has a prayer of evolving into a terrace chant, even though samples of terrace chants are spliced into several songs in the hope that it will make them feel more football-adjacent. There is not a single song which makes any attempt to engage with the cycles of joy, pain and pathos that make fandom what it is. Basically, there isn’t anything remotely like Three Lions. Just one full hour of hurt.

Admittedly, there are hundreds of songs which prove that it’s rather difficult to write lyrics that are actually about football without them sounding pitifully corny, with Three Lions the exception rather than the rule. The tracks here don’t even give it a crack, however. The Official FIFA World Cup 2026 Album doesn’t even treat football as an afterthought. It isn’t a thought.

Nor is it for music fans, quite frankly. It’s too safe, too generic, too bland, and entirely devoid of fundamental artistic merit. It feels like an album created only to appeal to the accountants and bureaucrats whose shadow looms over every decision made in the creative process, such as it was. This is a record that tries to tick several dozen boxes in the belief that doing so will give it mass-market appeal. Instead, it is unlikely to appeal to anyone whatsoever. Just watch the games, and give this a miss.

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