Inside Anitta’s World Cup opening performance

Anitta performed the official World Cup 2026 song “Goals” at the opening ceremony in Los Angeles, sharing the stage with LISA (BLACKPINK) and Rema, in a high-energy live debut of the track at SoFi Stadium. The performance was fast, choreographed, and built as a global pop moment rather than a traditional solo set, with all three artists appearing together throughout the song and trading sections across the stage while dancers filled the stadium production. Anitta handled her part of the track with a heavy Brazilian influence in her delivery and movement, blending into the Afrobeats and K-pop fusion of the song, and her presence stood out as the main Latin/Brazilian voice of the collaboration, especially during her Portuguese and rhythmic sections that connected the performance back to her funk-pop roots.

By that point in her career, she was already used to international stages. She had spent years building a name outside Brazil, working with artists from different countries and pushing herself into spaces where Latin pop and mainstream global pop overlap. Still, the World Cup opening ceremony is a different level of exposure. It’s not just music fans watching. It’s football fans, casual viewers, families, people who don’t usually follow pop culture at all. It’s one of those rare moments where entertainment becomes global background noise.

Her performance leaned heavily into what she has always done well, high energy movement, strong stage presence, and a kind of controlled chaos that fits perfectly with Brazilian pop influence. Everything felt fast paced, colorful, and built for camera cuts rather than a single fixed viewpoint. That’s important for an event like this, where most people are not in the stadium but watching through broadcast angles that change every second.

The staging itself followed the typical World Cup opening formula, quick transitions, layered visuals, and a heavy focus on movement rather than narrative storytelling. These performances don’t usually have time to build a slow atmosphere. Everything happens in minutes, sometimes seconds, so the impact has to be immediate. Anitta’s segment worked within that limitation and used it to her advantage. The performance never tried to slow down or become overly conceptual. It stayed direct, loud, and visually packed.

Behind the scenes, a show like this is far more complicated than it looks on screen. Every movement is rehearsed around camera positions, timing cues, and live broadcast coordination. Even small details like where a performer steps or when they turn their head can be adjusted to match how the broadcast director frames the shot. Anitta, who has been through large scale productions before, is no stranger to that kind of precision work, and it showed in how cleanly everything came together on screen.

For Brazil, seeing Anitta on that stage carried a different kind of weight. The country has always had a strong musical identity, but global stages like the World Cup opening ceremony don’t always reflect that in a modern pop context. There’s often a gap between traditional cultural representation and what current Brazilian pop actually looks like. Anitta sits right in that middle space. She comes from the funk carioca scene, but she also operates in the global pop industry, and that combination made her presence feel very aligned with how Brazil’s music scene actually exists today.

Her appearance also fits into the larger story of her career over the past few years, where she has been very intentional about expanding beyond the Brazilian market. Instead of waiting for international attention, she actively pursued collaborations, languages, and genres that allowed her to move across different audiences. The World Cup opening ceremony felt like one of those moments where that long term strategy paid off in a very visible way.

After the event, discussions didn’t really focus on technical perfection or set design details. Most of the conversation centered on visibility. Seeing a Brazilian female pop artist in that space, performing in front of a global audience during one of the most watched events in the world, was enough to make the moment stand out. It wasn’t framed as a breakthrough or a reinvention, just a moment that naturally fit into the trajectory she has been building for years.