TORONTO — Michael Bublé walked out in front of the Sole Power Choir, leaned into a rendition of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me,” and for a few minutes Canada’s World Cup looked less like a sporting event than a homecoming concert. The football would come ninety minutes later. First the country wanted to introduce itself.
The opening ceremony at BMO Field, staged before Canada’s match with Bosnia and Herzegovina, was the first the country has ever hosted at a men’s World Cup, and it spent its budget on the thing Canada actually exports best: musicians. Alessia Cara opened the show with more than two dozen dancers waving flags and hoisting art pieces shaped like Canadian wildlife. Alanis Morissette, in a red embellished jacket, sang “O Canada.” The lineup ran through Jessie Reyez, William Prince and a clutch of global names, a deliberate spread of the homegrown and the international.
The most modern moment belonged to the tournament’s own soundtrack. Nora Fatehi, the DJ Sanjoy and the French rapper Vegedream performed “Siir,” a track from the official 2026 World Cup album, the kind of cross-continental pop collaboration FIFA now commissions to signal that its showcase belongs to everybody. It is marketing, and it is also, on a good night, a genuinely fun three minutes of music.
There was an accidental subtext to Morissette’s anthem. On the same day she belted “O Canada” to open the host nation’s tournament, the country’s coach Jesse Marsch was in the middle of a transatlantic spat over national anthems, having praised his Canadian players for singing theirs while needling his old American employer. Whether anyone planned it or not, the ceremony delivered the visual to match the talking point, a Canadian icon singing the Canadian anthem at full voice while the argument about who sings what raged on television.
The ceremony was also a study in scale, which is the quiet theme of this whole World Cup. Mexico opened the tournament at the Estadio Azteca with Shakira and Bocelli in front of more than 80,000 people, a stadium built for spectacle. Canada’s was smaller and warmer, staged at a soccer-specific ground that holds a fraction of that, and the contrast suited the two countries. Mexico threw a coronation. Canada threw a house party.
What the music could not do was play the match, and the match nearly undid the mood. Canada trailed Bosnia until a late Cyle Larin equalizer rescued a 1-1 draw, the country’s first ever World Cup point, snatched after the ceremony’s glow had long since faded into the ordinary anxiety of a team trying not to lose. The party set the tone. The football, as it always does, ignored it.
An opening ceremony is the easiest part of hosting a World Cup, a few curated minutes designed for television before the hard month begins. What it cannot tell you is whether the country throwing it will still be playing when the tournament reaches its business end. Canada has a point and a home crowd and, for one afternoon, the best concert lineup any host has put on this side of the Azteca. The rest of it, the part that decides whether the party was a beginning or a peak, starts now.
