EJAE and LISA took the world’s biggest sporting stage at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. But is this K-pop’s triumph — or something the industry never planned for?
Football was never supposed to sing.
The ball rolls, the crowd erupts, the anthem plays — and that was always enough. Great matches spoke for themselves. Music was background. Ritual. A brief pause before the real thing began. The official FIFA anthem has existed for barely three decades, and most of those songs dissolved into the air the moment the final whistle blew.
Then, on June 11, 2026, Andrea Bocelli stepped onto the pitch at Estadio Azteca in Mexico City. And standing next to him — the woman SM Entertainment once told she was too old to debut.
Nations
Co-Hosting
Teams in
Tournament
EJAE’s SM
Training
Chapter One — Three Ceremonies
This World Cup was different from the start. For the first time in the tournament’s history, three nations co-hosted — and FIFA gave each city its own opening ceremony on its own night. Mexico City on June 11. Toronto and Los Angeles on June 12. Each stage carried a distinct cultural identity: Mexico’s folkloric color and confetti, Toronto’s mosaic of immigration, LA SoFi’s forward-looking visual spectacle.
The creative architecture was overseen by Marco Balich, who has directed multiple Olympic opening ceremonies. What FIFA handed him wasn’t simply a show brief. It was a mandate: prove to the world that this tournament — now expanded to 48 nations — had outgrown the category of sporting event entirely.
The soundtrack to that proof had Korean pop threaded through all three stages.
Chapter Two — EJAE
EJAE. Outside Korea’s music industry circles, the name is still unfamiliar to most. But reading this moment as a simple feature credit would be a mistake.
Look at the official World Cup anthem “DNA” and its four names: Andrea Bocelli. David Guetta. Megan Thee Stallion. EJAE. Different genres, different continents, different generations. FIFA didn’t assemble this lineup as a diversity gesture. It assembled it as an accurate portrait of what global pop actually looks like in 2026.
And EJAE’s place in that portrait carries a specific weight.
Age eleven. Signed to SM Entertainment as a trainee. Begins ten years of preparation for a girl group debut that never comes.
Dropped from SM. Reason given: “too old to debut.” Relocates to New York. Enrolls at NYU, double majors in music production and psychology.
Co-writes “Psycho” for Red Velvet. Continues as a shadow songwriter — placing tracks at SM, JYP, and HYBE while largely uncredited to the public.
Cast as Rumi in Netflix’s K-Pop Demon Hunters. The film’s centerpiece song “Golden” hits No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Golden Globe and Grammy nominations follow.
First Grammy win by a Korean-heritage artist. Six months later: the FIFA World Cup opening ceremony, Estadio Azteca, performing alongside Andrea Bocelli in front of the largest sporting audience on earth.
When Jungkook performed “Dreamers” at the 2022 Qatar World Cup opening, it was K-pop’s system delivering its most refined product to the world’s biggest stage — the idol machine at full output.
EJAE is the person that system discarded. She was trained by it, dropped by it, and then quietly rewrote its songs from the outside for a decade. Her presence at the 2026 opening ceremony is not a victory for the K-pop idol industry. It is proof that K-pop has become something larger than that industry — a global infrastructure, a musical language fluent enough to carry people the system itself never chose to platform. The machine didn’t put her there. The language it built did.
“Being perfect is such a big thing while training. That heartbreak — me not aligning, getting dropped — I brought all of that into the lyrics and the performance.”
EJAE — Grammy.com, 2025
Chapter Three — LISA
June 12. LA SoFi Stadium. LISA took the stage with Anitta and Rema for the live premiere of the official album track “Goals” — becoming the first woman from a K-pop group to perform at a World Cup opening ceremony. Another superlative added to a list that keeps growing. But the superlative isn’t the point.
LISA — Opening verse. Sharp rap delivery. First voice the world hears.
Anitta — Centre section in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Targeting the Americas.
Rema — Closing verse in Afrobeats. Targeting Africa and the Middle East.
Three artists, three continents, three co-hosting nations. When FIFA designed this track, LISA wasn’t assigned a quota representing Asia. She was chosen to open it. She is the first voice on the biggest sports song of the year.
Anyone who has followed LISA’s trajectory since leaving BLACKPINK understands the significance. The Victoria’s Secret runway. An independent global tour. And now this. She didn’t arrive at SoFi Stadium as K-pop’s ambassador. She arrived as a global pop player — one whose identity has already moved past any single genre or flag. The distinction matters. It’s the difference between being invited and belonging.
I want to say something plainly. In the days following these performances, most outlets will reach for the phrase “K-pop going global.” It isn’t wrong. But it is too easy.
Globalization describes a process of moving from the periphery toward the center. That process is finished. When two artists shaped by the K-pop ecosystem are carrying the official soundtrack of the largest sporting event on earth, the center is no longer somewhere else to reach.
The harder question is what comes next. EJAE winning a Grammy and performing at the World Cup was not an outcome the K-pop industry engineered. LISA standing on this stage as an independent artist was not the product of any label’s strategy. Both arrived here outside the system, or through the cracks in it.
So whose victory is this, exactly? K-pop’s? Or the individuals the industry couldn’t contain? If you can’t answer that easily, good. It means you’re paying attention.