I watched the reaction to the World Cup final halftime show roll in as it happened. Madonna, Shakira, BTS, Justin Bieber, Burna Boy, even Kermit and Miss Piggy showed up for the first-ever halftime show at a FIFA World Cup final. Within minutes people online were tearing it apart.
One prominent football writer called the whole idea an anti-football abomination. A former England striker went viral for saying the best part of the show was when it finally ended. British papers piled on too, calling it glib and unsubtle, while an American outlet described it as blandly, sappily crowd-pleasing.
I don’t have strong feelings about the show itself, honestly. What caught my attention was the speed of it. The half-time break reportedly ran to 27 minutes instead of the planned 20. Before the players had jogged back onto the field, a huge chunk of the internet had already made up its mind. It was a disaster. FIFA had ruined the tradition. America had ruined the tradition. All of that got decided in less time than it takes to watch the halftime show itself.
We Do the Exact Same Thing With People
I bring this up because it’s such a clean example of something I see wreck people’s confidence at work all the time. It’s how fast we judge each other and how much we worry about being judged in return.
Think about how quickly you size someone up when you first meet them. Their handshake, their outfit, whether they seem nervous. You’ve usually built a whole story about them before they’ve said more than a few sentences. You almost never go back to check if that story held up.
I see this play out constantly with the leaders I work with. Someone pitches an idea and stumbles over a word. The room quietly writes her off as not ready for the promotion. A new hire asks a question that sounds obvious, and the team decides he’s not sharp enough. A leader tries something bold and it doesn’t land perfectly the first time. The story that sticks isn’t that she tried something new. It’s that it didn’t work.
One writer covering the halftime show backlash described it well. Fans show up with an unspoken agreement about how things are supposed to go. The moment something breaks that agreement, they punish it before they’ve fully processed what actually happened. I think that’s most judgment in a sentence. We carry expectations we never say out loud, and then we get frustrated when reality doesn’t match them.
What Got Crowded Out
Here’s what didn’t dominate the global conversation the way the runtime complaints did. Buried in that same 27-minute show was a group of kids from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Kampala, Uganda. They shared a stage with Shakira and Burna Boy in front of one of the largest television audiences in the world. It got real coverage, especially across Ugandan and African outlets, but it never came close to matching the reach of the “FIFA ruined the tradition” takes that spread everywhere else.
They’re known as the Ghetto Kids, originally the Triplets Ghetto Kids, a dance troupe made up of children and teenagers from the Katwe slum, one of Kampala’s poorest neighborhoods. Their choreography first drew international attention back in 2014, and it kept building from there. Shakira came across a clip of them dancing to one of her own songs and personally invited them to join her and Burna Boy on the World Cup stage. That made them the first East African act to ever perform at a FIFA World Cup Final halftime show.
For a group of kids who started out filming dance videos in the street, that’s not a footnote. They posted afterward that dreams really do come true and that performing with Shakira was something they’d carry with them for the rest of their lives. Back home, the moment landed as something much bigger than entertainment. It was proof that talent from Katwe could reach the same stage as Madonna and BTS.
Most of the halftime show takedowns never mentioned it. The critics reviewing runtime and production value weren’t wrong that the show ran long or that it disrupted the rhythm of the match. But they were reviewing the show as a spectacle, not as a moment in a dozen different people’s lives. The loudest, fastest opinions rarely make room for both.
That’s the part of quick judgment that costs the most.
The criticism isn’t necessarily unfair. It’s incomplete. You can hold two things at once, that the production choices were questionable and that a group of kids from Katwe just had the biggest night of their lives on the same stage. Most of the loudest reactions online only had room for one of those.
What Confident People Do Differently
This is part of why Respect Yourself is the first pillar in the REAL Method®, the framework I built around what actually separates people who keep moving forward from people who stay stuck. Self-respect won’t stop people from criticizing you. What it changes is how much power that criticism has over you once it shows up.
The performers at MetLife Stadium had to know a chunk of that audience would hate the show before the first note played. Some of the sharpest sports and entertainment writers in the world were sitting in that stadium waiting to weigh in, and they weren’t going to be gentle about it. The performers went out and did it anyway.
I don’t think that’s thick skin, exactly. I think it’s a decision, and it’s the same one I ask leaders to make when we work on confidence together: accept that anything you do in public is going to draw some judgment, and let that be fine. Shakira and BTS didn’t get a do-over. The show happened once, imperfectly, in front of hundreds of millions of people. Now it’s part of World Cup history regardless of what the reviews said.
The people who move fastest toward what they want usually aren’t avoiding criticism better than everyone else. They’ve just stopped treating fast judgment as meaningful information. Someone forming a complete opinion in ten seconds is usually telling you more about themselves than about you.
Try Asking a Different Question
Next time you catch yourself deciding something about a person, a decision, or a performance in the first few seconds, slow down for a second. Ask what you’d think if you’d seen the whole story instead of the highlight reel. Ask what it cost that person to try in the first place. In addition, ask whether your reaction is really about them or about your own expectations getting disrupted.
Most of us are going to have a public halftime show moment eventually, a bold attempt that doesn’t land the same way for everyone watching. Confidence doesn’t mean you avoid those moments. It means you make them anyway, and you try to give other people the same grace you’d want when it’s your turn to be judged in real time.
