After 32 years away, the FIFA World Cup returns to North America this week, kicking off a massive summer of soccer that will stretch across the entire continent from now until the final wraps on July 19th. Like all World Cups, it’s a big deal, with 48 nations sending their best and brightest soccer players to claim the title.
The last time the US hosted a World Cup was 1994, and the country — and the game — looks a lot different today than it did back then. That tournament, along with the success of the US Women’s National Team, served as a catalyst for the evolution of soccer in the United States; this year, American soccer fanatics like myself hope it will do the same for the next generation, despite FIFA and the current administration’s best efforts to be cash-grabbing assholes about it. But unlike countries like Brazil and Germany, the US sports landscape is notably dense, meaning that as far as attention is concerned, soccer still has to compete with the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL’s overall viewership and engagement.
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So, as a laundry list of the world’s best soccer players — including a few already pegged to be some of the greatest of all time — touch down stateside, hundreds of Americans may be wondering why everyone’s talking about a teenager named Lamine Yamal or why Argentina’s current best player is not the 38-year-old Lionel Messi, but the 26-year-old phenom Julián Alvarez. There are 48 teams participating in the group stage (an increase from the usual 32 teams), and 104 matches set to be played. That’s a lot of soccer to ingest if you’re not keyed in on each nation’s respective stars and narratives.
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Maybe, then, you need a bit of guidance to know who to really pay attention to during the tournament this summer. We’re music heads at Consequence, so to help you understand the status and ability of the 2026 FIFA World Cup’s biggest players, we’ve paired and compared them to a handful of today’s biggest music stars across pop, rock, and hip-hop. This is by no means a complete list of the upcoming tournament’s best players, nor is it a solidified ranking of music stars by order of fame and reach; instead, it’s merely a way of translating one language of greatness into another.
Read on for a guide to the 2026 FIFA World Cup’s biggest stars as today’s musicians, listed in alphabetical order by first name.