Wayne Rooney Critiques World Cup Final Half-Time Show

Wayne Rooney has never been one to dress up an opinion. On the biggest night in world football, with Spain and Argentina locked in a World Cup final at MetLife Stadium, the former England captain saved his sharpest tackle for the show rather than the sport.

FIFA had stretched the interval into a 27‑minute spectacle – almost double the traditional 15 – to squeeze in an 11‑minute, star‑studded performance featuring Madonna, Shakira, Justin Bieber and more. It was billed as a landmark moment: the first World Cup final half-time show, curated by Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, designed to echo the glitz and scale of the NFL’s Super Bowl.

Rooney was having none of it.

Sitting alongside Joe Hart and Micah Richards on BBC duty, the 40‑year‑old was asked by presenter Gabby Logan for his highlight of the performance. He barely paused.

“I’ll be honest, mine was when it finished,” he said. No sugar-coating. No polite caveats. Just the blunt verdict of a man who wanted the ball back in play.

“I like a lot of them artists but I thought it was crap,” he added, making it clear the problem wasn’t the names on stage, but the show itself. “It just didn’t get me going and I wanted the football to come back on. I like Burna Boy, I like Bieber, I like Shakira, but that was too flat.”

Across the broadcast desk, Richards tried to lighten the mood, nominating Shakira and Nigerian star Burna Boy as his standout acts and labelling his former England team-mate “miserable” for the withering assessment. Logan, picking up on the exchange just after an in-house advert, delivered the punchline: “I’ll tell you what else you get on the BBC: honest reviews.”

Honest, and in Rooney’s case, brutal.

The show itself had been months in the making. FIFA president Gianni Infantino first announced the plan in March of the previous year, selling it as a global celebration of music and football. The production threw everything at the stage.

Madonna was driven onto the pitch by Brazil legends Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. South Korean giants BTS performed. Characters from the Muppets and Sesame Street wandered into the mix. It was colour, noise, celebrity – a spectacle built for television and social media.

Inside the stadium, many appeared to revel in it. On British television, the reaction cut colder.

On ITV, Roy Keane – another pundit not known for pulling punches – called it “a bit of an anti-climax”, before softening just enough to add: “but I think the people in the stadium probably enjoyed it more than us. But it’s always nice to see Shakira.”

There was a serious cause behind the razzmatazz. FIFA staged the half-time show in support of the FIFA Global Citizen Education Fund, an initiative aiming to raise 100 million US dollars to expand access to education and football for children worldwide. That message sat behind the fireworks, famous faces and choreography, even if it struggled to cut through the noise of opinion once the pundits took over.

And this was only half the entertainment bill.

Before kick-off, the closing ceremony had already turned the World Cup final into a full-scale variety event. Hollywood star Tom Cruise appeared, joined by Robbie Williams and Jennifer Hudson. Nicole Scherzinger, Italian singer-songwriter Laura Pausini and streamer IShowSpeed all performed, with Post Malone and rapper Swae Lee also taking the stage.

By the time the teams finally emerged for the second half, the night had become a collision of two worlds: football’s biggest match and America’s appetite for halftime theatre.

For FIFA, this is clearly the direction of travel – a global show around the game, not just a game watched around the world. For traditionalists like Rooney, the message was just as clear.

Enough of the concert. Get the football back on.