Jungkook Did It First. Lisa Does It Next. FIFA Has Made K-pop a World Cup Tradition.
On November 20, 2022, Jungkook of BTS performed "Dreamers" at the FIFA World Cup opening ceremony in Lusail, Qatar. The stadium held 88,000 people. The song charted in 22 countries. It was the first time a Korean artist had ever performed at a World Cup opening. At the time, FIFA framed it as a one-off - a nod to the tournament's expanding global fanbase and a practical acknowledgment that BTS was the largest musical act on the planet that year.
It was not a one-off.
On June 12, 2026, Lisa - born Lalisa Manobal in Buriram, Thailand, former member of BLACKPINK - will perform at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles alongside Katy Perry, Future, and DJ Sanjoy as part of the 2026 FIFA World Cup opening ceremonies. She will be the first Thai national and the first female K-pop artist to perform at the tournament. The announcement, confirmed by FIFA President Gianni Infantino on May 9, makes Lisa the second K-pop act on what is now a two-entry list at the sport's biggest global event.
That's a pattern. And the gap between the two data points tells you something worth knowing about where both K-pop and FIFA are heading.
The Expansion Problem FIFA Is Solving
The 2026 World Cup is the first to feature 48 teams, up from 32. It's also the first co-hosted across three nations - the United States, Canada, and Mexico - which is why, for the first time in tournament history, there are three separate opening ceremonies. Los Angeles on June 12. Toronto the same day. Mexico City on June 11. Each ceremony runs 13 to 16 minutes and carries a different cultural brief.
FIFA President Infantino described the LA lineup as reflecting "the cultural diversity of the United States and the vibrancy of its many diasporas." The framing is deliberate. The US ceremony is not built around American heritage acts. It's built around artists who represent populations that FIFA is actively trying to convert into soccer fans - and spending power that the tournament desperately wants to activate.
The math here: the US has roughly 1.9 million Korean Americans and an estimated 2.2 million Thai Americans. More significantly, BLACKPINK and BTS collectively command the largest organized international fanbases of any musical acts currently working. ARMY and BLINK are not demographic slices. They are distribution systems - for merchandise, for streams, for ticket purchases, for tournament-adjacent media engagement.
When FIFA books a K-pop artist for its opening ceremony, it is not making a cultural statement. It is acquiring a fanbase.
What Jungkook's 2022 Booking Actually Was
The 2022 Qatar booking looked like an outlier at the time. BTS had just announced a temporary group hiatus. Jungkook performed as a solo act, not as a representative of the full group. "Dreamers" - co-written with Qatari singer Fahad Al-Kubaisi - was engineered for maximum cross-cultural reach: English verses, Arabic hooks, production built to work in a stadium with 88,000 people who spoke 40 different languages.
The song hit No. 1 in South Korea and charted in 22 countries. FIFA logged more than 100 million streams of "Dreamers" across platforms in the tournament's first two weeks. For context, the official soundtrack of the 2018 World Cup in Russia - featuring Nicky Jam, Will Smith, and Era Istrefi - generated a fraction of that engagement at launch.
FIFA noticed. What the organization concluded from the Jungkook booking was not that BTS was uniquely powerful, but that K-pop as a genre delivered a level of pre-organized global engagement that no other entertainment category could match at equivalent cost.
Why Lisa, and Why Now
Lisa is, in several ways, a more interesting pick than a continuation of the BTS line would have been. She is Thai, not Korean - which matters to FIFA because Southeast Asia represents one of the fastest-growing soccer markets in the world and one of K-pop's most established international fan networks. The Thai national team qualified for the 2026 World Cup for the first time in the country's history. Lisa performing at the US ceremony is, from a marketing standpoint, a direct address to every Southeast Asian household watching.
Her solo career has tracked steadily upward since her 2021 solo debut "Lalisa," which set a first-week sales record for a female K-pop solo artist at 736,000 copies. Her 2025 album Alter Ego expanded her audience into electronic and club music territory, and her Coachella 2026 solo appearance - the same festival where BIGBANG headlined weeks earlier - positioned her firmly in the Western festival circuit before the World Cup booking landed.
She is also, unlike Jungkook in 2022, not appearing as a proxy for an absent group. She is appearing as herself.
The Formula Taking Shape
Two bookings is a sample size of two. But the logic connecting them is consistent enough to state plainly: FIFA has identified K-pop as a mechanism for opening-ceremony engagement that maps onto tournament expansion geography. In 2022, the Qatar booking addressed Asia broadly and leveraged BTS's global reach at the peak of their commercial power. In 2026, the LA booking addresses the US diaspora audience and Southeast Asia simultaneously, through an artist whose solo identity is now large enough to carry the weight without a group behind her.
The 2030 World Cup - co-hosted by Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, with centenary matches in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay - will stage in at least five different countries across two continents. If the pattern holds, the opening ceremonies will require artists who can speak to Latin America, North Africa, and Southern Europe at once.
There are K-pop artists who can deliver that.
Not every K-pop booking will be Jungkook's "Dreamers." That song was built for the moment in ways Lisa's June 12 setlist almost certainly will not be - the ceremonial function is different in a three-city format, and the 13-minute runtime in LA gives her less space for a purpose-built anthem. Reports suggest she is preparing a World Cup soundtrack alongside Anitta, Rema, and Brazilian group Tropkillaz, but no official track has been confirmed as of May 11.
What has been confirmed is the slot. FIFA has put a K-pop artist on its opening ceremony stage for the second consecutive tournament. The question for 2030 is not whether there will be a third. The question is which market FIFA decides it needs.
