Fans Use AI to Create World Cup Anthems, Challenging Official FIFA Songs

With only weeks until the 2026 World Cup kicks off, fans around the globe are leveraging artificial intelligence to churn out a wave of high-impact support songs on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. These tracks are racking up millions of plays, in some cases overtaking the official music commissioned by the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) from professional artists.

Experts say the trend raises fresh questions about copyright, artist compensation and the value of human creativity. Yet many users seem unfazed, even showing a preference for AI-generated tunes over FIFA’s official anthems by Jelly Roll and Carin Leon.

A much-anticipated World Cup song by Shakira was released last week, but the fan-made AI music craze is already generating excitement for the tournament set to take place in cities across the United States, Canada and Mexico in June and July.

The trend began with a song for the French team titled “Imbattables,” released in February by Crystalo, who Spotify bills as “France’s leading AI music creator.” The track opens with a roll call naming Kylian Mbappe and other stars of the French squad.

Soon after, a Brazil anthem appeared in a similar call-and-response format set to a trendy phonk beat. Producer Guilherme Maia, who goes by M4IA, told AFP he created the track by blending different elements with AI assistance. Songs for top teams such as Portugal, Argentina and Germany quickly popped up on platforms, drawing praise from fans.

However, while the Brazil version closely resembled the original French track, later songs copied Maia’s template exactly. Each reuses the phonk beat, lists player names and calls for respect toward the team’s “king”—a treatment reserved for Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Argentina’s Lionel Messi in their respective anthems.

“What I see happening now is people chasing the trend or trying to recreate the feeling,” Maia told AFP, noting that artistic imitation has long existed in music. Though excited about the possibilities AI opens up, he acknowledged the technology poses fresh questions about authorship and copyright.

“In music, there are clear rules. You can’t copy someone else’s work or use samples without permission, even when AI is involved,” Maia stressed. He said he built his track on a proprietary platform and only used AI as an assistant for certain elements, rather than relying on music-generation tools like Suno to produce an entire song from a prompt.

Jason Palamara, assistant professor of music technology at Indiana University, said current models lack clarity on how artists are credited if their copyrighted work is used to train AI. “That has to come from somewhere,” he said.

Inconsistencies seen in AI-generated images also appear in music. For example, a fan-made World Cup anthem for Portugal is sung with a Brazilian accent, while the Colombia version reads James Rodriguez’s name in an English accent instead of Spanish. Palamara added that AI-produced music often lacks complexity.

Still, Morgan Hayduk, co-CEO of music rights software firm Beatdapp, argued that listeners of World Cup support songs may not seek artistic depth. “There seems to be a group of people who really don’t care,” Hayduk said. “They like the music, and they like the story behind it—that it comes from a large language model rather than a songwriter or a band.”

Despite concerns over how the industry will adapt to AI, he said fast, easy-to-sing-along songs suitable for commercials represent an obvious use case for AI-generated music at this stage. “Knowing what goes into a synthetic output, like a World Cup anthem, is the thorny road the music industry has to figure out now.”