Every four years, the World Cup arrives like a chic, summer-spanning version of the Super Bowl. And just like its American counterpart, it requires a massive musical spectacle—the World Cup anthem. But while a Super Bowl halftime show only needs to capture the world’s attention for fifteen minutes, a tournament song has to soundtrack a month of soccer games for billions of fans.

Because the musical landscape changes so fast, these anthems naturally split into distinct decade eras. A track that defined the tournament in the late ’90s sounds completely different from what moves a crowd today—even with the growing push for nostalgia and trend-cycling that affects the sound and the shape of the charts. Pop music has completely rewritten its own rules over the last 35 years, and the official World Cup anthems have evolved right alongside it, shifting from percussive Latin pop to electropop all the way back to Latin pop, thanks to Shakira’s iron-tight grip on the global soccer scene.

Here’s the single best, most defining World Cup song from every decade since the 1990s, and a breakdown of exactly why they worked.

The 1990s: Ricky Martin – “La Copa de la Vida” (1998)

Before Ricky Martin strutted onto the field in France, World Cup songs were less about pumping up the party with pop and more about majestic, marching band-led melodies and niche cultural sounds. Martin completely broke that mold, delivering a Latin pop bop that you didn’t have to understand Spanish to enjoy, although it did have both Spanish and English recordings.

The track basically invented the blueprint for the modern sports anthem, centering the entire chorus around a simple, stadium-wide chant (“Allez, Allez, Allez!“) that allowed millions of fans to scream along regardless of what language they spoke. By the time Martin performed it at the Grammys the following year, it had become a crossover hit that helped push Latin pop into the mainstream.

The 2000s: Anastacia – “Boom” (2002)

The official song of the 2002 tournament in South Korea and Japan is a time capsule of turn-of-the-millennium electronic pop. Moving away from the live, horn-heavy bands of the ’90s, Anastacia delivered a track driven by synthesizers and computer-generated club beats that felt deeply tied to the early digital age.

Wearing her signature tinted sunglasses, the Y2K icon brought a futuristic, fun energy to the stage that matched the branding of the first-ever Asian-hosted World Cup. The track traded traditional stadium beats for a booming club bassline, proving that a soccer anthem could sound just as natural in a neon-lit Tokyo nightclub as it did on the turf.

The 2010s: Shakira feat. Freshlyground – “Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)” (2010)

With billions of views on YouTube, “Waka Waka” is easily one of the biggest pop hits ever recorded. Built on a traditional Cameroonian march rhythm mixed with Shakira’s signature Colombian style, it completely overshadowed the other official tracks of the 2010 tournament in South Africa and started a global dance trend that people still copy today.

Shakira brought on local South African band Freshlyground to share the stage, leaning into an acoustic, drum-heavy sound that matched the energy of the fans in the stands. Instead of relying on standard radio pop tropes, the song felt refreshingly global, setting a new benchmark for what a World Cup anthem should look and sound like. Oh, and the fact that Shakira met her longtime partner, Spanish soccer star Gerard Piqué, on the set of the music video has to count for something, right?

The 2020s: Shakira feat. Burna Boy – “Dai Dai” (2026)

Anchoring the massive multi-host tournament across North America, this track brings the timeline full circle by mixing smooth Afrobeats with the Latin pop that started the new wave of World Cup music in the first place. By pairing up with global giant Burna Boy, Shakira managed to dominate the international soccer stage for yet another year.

With a multilingual chorus and motivational lyrics, the song is undeniably built for a global sporting event set in America, where everything is bigger and better, delivering a stadium chant built to shake eighty thousand seats. Decades after she first started soundtracking the tournament, Shakira proved she still knows exactly how to make the whole world dance.

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