{"id":740036,"date":"2026-07-21T04:55:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-21T01:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/fifa-world-cup-halftime-show-director-on-making-first-ever-concert-challenging-beyond-challenging\/"},"modified":"2026-07-21T04:55:16","modified_gmt":"2026-07-21T01:55:16","slug":"fifa-world-cup-halftime-show-director-on-making-first-ever-concert-challenging-beyond-challenging","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/fifa-world-cup-halftime-show-director-on-making-first-ever-concert-challenging-beyond-challenging\/","title":{"rendered":"FIFA World Cup Halftime Show Director on Making First-Ever Concert: \u201cChallenging Beyond Challenging\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tHamish Hamilton has directed over a dozen Super Bowls, the opening ceremony to the 2012 Summer Olympics, six Emmy Awards ceremonies, four Oscars and three Grammy nights, among many more marquee events. None of those, he says, were quite as challenging as the first-ever FIFA World Cup Finals Halftime Show he directed on Sunday.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cA lot of that is because it was the first,\u201d Hamilton, co-founder of the production company Done + Dusted, tells The Hollywood Reporter <\/em>over Zoom from his New Jersey hotel room the morning after the World Cup, calling the show \u201cchallenging beyond challenging.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAlong with the Olympics, this was right up there,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m sure the first Super Bowl Halftime show was incredibly difficult, but when I came in they\u2019d already done over 40 of them. By the time you get to Super Bowl 47, the NFL\u2019s got everything super well drilled. But in this kind of scenario, there are so many unanswered questions. There\u2019s all the people who haven\u2019t done it before, a huge amount of nervousness, we\u2019re doing this in daylight, you\u2019ve got the grass, you\u2019ve got a huge collection of superstars. It\u2019s absolutely terrifying because there are so many things can go wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLuckily for Hamilton and FIFA, they didn\u2019t have any technical snags Sunday, and months of prep came and went in a quick-fleeting moment as Madonna, BTS, Justin Bieber, a Gustavo Dudamel-led orchestra, Shakira, Burna Boy, the PS22 Choir and the Muppets all hit the stage in an 11-minute time span. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a mixture of exhaustion, relief and happ<\/a>iness,\u201d Hamilton says of the show\u2019s conclusion. \u201cI\u2019m very proud of what we did to help bring Chris [Martin, of Coldplay, who served as curator] and Global Citizens\u2019 vision to life. They had this dream four years ago. It\u2019s an enormous undertaking and they should be applauded for what they did.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFiguring out how to format the show to fit so many acts in such a short time frame was its own challenge, but as Hamilton says, the bigger question was the \u201cgargantuan kind of logistical undertaking\u201d involved with the broader production. There was the \u201cvery strong daylight that just kept coming,\u201d which influenced how they shot the whole show. And whereas the NFL game<\/a>s MetLife Stadium usually hosts are played on artificial turf, the FIFA final was played on grass. The more delicate surface impacts everything for halftime, from what stage sets are possible to what sorts of cameras they could use.<\/p>\n

\n\tPlenty of the pressure was coming from outside as well. The halftime show was the subject of skepticism from soccer fans around the globe, who questioned the need for the show and worried about how adding a concert to a game where halftime is normally just 15 minutes would impact the competition itself. The Cure\u2019s Robert Smith made headlines last week ahead of the finals in his critique of the show, writing \u201cpleasejustfuckoff.\u201d The Guardian<\/em>, meanwhile, referred to the concert as \u201cthe half-time show nobody asked for.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tHamilton, himself British and a lifelong fan of the Premier League\u2019s Arsenal F.C., acknowledged those sentiments and noted they\u2019re more prevalent in markets outside of the U.S., which is historically much more acclimated to melding music and sport thanks to events like the Super Bowl.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m a football fan, and have been my entire life,\u201d he says. \u201cAround the world, certainly around Europe and in the U.K., I saw some people who were like, \u2018We don\u2019t want your halftime show. We don\u2019t want the Americanization of the beautiful game.\u2019 I was, of course, very aware of that resistance. It\u2019s not so much in America, because sports, entertainment and music sit a lot closer together here than they do probably anywhere else in the world. But I was very aware of that, and also about disrupting the second half if there were any issues with the grass. It\u2019s hard, it\u2019s pressure.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWill any skeptics be converted now that the first show has come and gone with the rest of the tournament? <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s a very good question, I was so absorbed and immersed in creating the show within the game,\u201d Hamilton says. \u201cIf someone else was directing and I was just watching from London [as a fan], maybe I could comment. But listen, it\u2019s the World Cup Final, it\u2019s the greatest, most-watched sporting event in the world. Having been part of it as a live director, I would say on balance definitely, and I hope that they do another one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Hamish Hamilton has directed over a dozen Super Bowls, the opening ceremony to the 2012 Summer Olympics, six Emmy Awards ceremonies, four Oscars and three Grammy nights, among many more marquee events. None of those, he says, were quite as challenging as the first-ever FIFA World Cup Finals Halftime Show he directed on Sunday. \u201cA…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":740037,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/GettyImages-2286796132.jpg?crop=0px%2C61px%2C4488px%2C2514px&resize=1440%2C810","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[134239,39579,130613],"class_list":["post-740036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-social-mediaa","tag-fifa-world-cup","tag-music","tag-world-cup-2026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=740036"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/740036\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/740037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=740036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=740036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=740036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}