Ninety minutes before the first whistle, the pitch at New York New Jersey Stadium belonged not to footballers but to a phalanx of drummers and dancers in neon tracksuits, parting to reveal the streamer IShowSpeed. He bounced across the turf to his track “Champions”, a figure born of the internet’s chaotic energy now planted at the centre of the sport’s most-watched event. The stadium, still filling with more than 80,000 spectators, became a collision of digital celebrity and live spectacle, a prelude to an evening that would repeatedly blur the line between sporting contest and global entertainment broadcast.

What followed was a rapid-fire parade of pop royalty. Post Malone, in a white cowboy hat and jeans, delivered “Chrome Heartbreaker” before Swae Lee joined him for “Sunflower”, the performance capped by a volley of fireworks that ringed the upper tiers. Then came a cross-continental trio: Britain’s Robbie Williams, Italy’s Laura Pausini and the American Nicole Scherzinger, who together performed the FIFA anthem “Desire” as a giant globe rotated on the field. Pausini, speaking to the BBC, described the invitation from Williams as a moment that gave her “goosebumps everywhere”, a sentiment that captured the ceremony’s studied blend of personal fandom and mass-market reach. Jennifer Hudson, an EGOT winner, closed the pre-match protocol with a live-band rendition of the US national anthem, her voice filling the same space that would soon host the anthems of Argentina and Spain.

Then came the pivot from music to message. The actor Tom Cruise, whose presence had been teased for days, stepped to a podium at the centre circle. “Forty-eight nations began a journey,” he said, his words carried by international broadcasters. “They crossed oceans. They crossed borders. They crossed cultures.” He called football “a language spoken without words, a force that unites people”, before declaring the final a celebration of a tournament that “brought the world together”. The speech, delivered by a Hollywood star with no prior link to the sport, was met with a mixture of surprise and applause, its tone of earnest universalism echoing the ceremony’s production by Balich Wonder Studio, the Italian firm behind Olympic opening and closing sequences.

For the first time in World Cup history, the final also featured a halftime show, an 11-minute set curated by Coldplay’s Chris Martin and designed to raise funds for the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund. The lineup, announced in advance, promised Madonna, Justin Bieber, Shakira, Burna Boy and the K-pop group BTS, who were making their first major appearance since completing South Korea’s mandatory military service. The extended interval, stretching to nearly 25 minutes, turned the match into a hybrid event, part sporting contest, part telethon. As the pre-match fireworks faded and the teams emerged, the stadium’s transformation from concert hall to arena was complete, leaving only the question of whether the football could match the scale of its own preamble.