Are Soccer’s Showcase Games the Riskiest Gig in Music?

Even to some of the most glittering names in music, the pitch is compelling.

There is a gig. It is a very short gig: a tight six minutes or so. It is also unpaid. In exchange, though, the offer promises exposure that borders on priceless: a live crowd numbering somewhere around 70,000, and a captive television audience in the hundreds of millions.

The appeal of serving as the pregame entertainment at one of European soccer’s twin showpieces — the finals of the Champions League and the European Championship — is so obvious, and the benefits of that brief performance so extravagant, that the likes of Camila Cabello, Alicia Keys and the Black Eyed Peas (albeit without Fergie) have signed up to do it.

There is, however, a catch. For most, what is likely to be one of the most high-profile gigs of their career might also be the riskiest booking in music, one that comes with a nonzero chance of being loudly, unapologetically, unremittingly booed.

Regret is not a guarantee, of course. There are acts that look back on their brush with soccer fondly, artists who serve as beacons of hope for the (somewhat unwieldy) trio that is scheduled to play just before the final of Euro 2024 on Sunday in Berlin. That lineup — the Italian dance act Meduza, the German singer Leony and the American rock band OneRepublic — have presumably chosen to focus on the more positive precedents.

Dua Lipa was such a hit at the 2018 Champions League final that she has subsequently suggested she now considers herself an honorary Liverpool fan. Oceana, a German singer who performed at the final of the 2012 European Championship, remembers it as one of the highlights of her career. “The whole stadium was singing,” she said in an interview last week.

They, though, are probably the exceptions, rather than the rule. Lenny Kravitz was booed at the Champions League final in London last month. Adam Gyorgy, one of the world’s foremost classical pianists, was whistled at the same event last year.

The band Imagine Dragons saw the chance to play the 2019 Champions League final as a way to reach “as many people as we can around the world,” its singer, Dan Reynolds, said. They felt their “promotional, upbeat” brand of rock fit neatly with elite sports. They were booed.

Cabello — already a bona fide superstar when she performed at the 2022 Champions League final in Paris — was not booed. But she was ignored: A few hours after her performance, a message appeared on her social media chastising the fans in attendance for being “rude,” having insisted on singing “their team’s anthems so loud during our show.” (The post was swiftly deleted.)

It should be stressed that it is unlikely that any of this is personal. It is not a reflection on the artists’ popularity or talent or the quality of their set. It is, instead, indicative of soccer’s ongoing struggle to balance tradition and modernity, its unease at the blurring of the lines between sports and entertainment, and fans’ reflexive resistance to what many of them see as creeping Americanization. The stars are just collateral damage.

“It wasn’t about Lenny Kravitz as a person or musician,” said Clemens Boisserée, a Borussia Dortmund fan who booed Kravitz’s performance at Wembley last month. “It was booing for UEFA. We were showing them this kind of event is not needed. It is not something supporters want. This was just not the right act at the right time.”

Unlike in the United States — where the Super Bowl halftime show has long been one of the most desirable pieces of entertainment real estate on offer and, for many fans and viewers, a highlight of the event in itself — the addition of live music to major European soccer finals is still a relatively new phenomenon.

While every European Championship since 1992 has had a designated “anthem,” the early efforts were so low key as to verge on self-sabotage: The 1996 song, performed live before the final by the British band Simply Red, was not even included on the official tournament album.

It was not until 2016 that UEFA, European soccer’s governing body, decided to add a live act to the Champions League final, the biggest annual game in the sport. But rather than simply copy the N.F.L. and bring the band out as halftime entertainment, UEFA decided to stage its show before kickoff and to sell the rights to Pepsi, a sponsor which has a say in selecting the acts.

The thinking, according to Guy-Laurent Epstein, UEFA’s longtime commercial director, was not only practical — soccer’s 15-minute halftime interval is too brief to allow a set to be erected, an act to perform and the staging to be removed — but a way to ensure that the atmosphere was at its peak immediately before kickoff, when the eyes of the world are focused on the game.

“It finishes six or seven minutes before kickoff, and that gives enough time for fans to build on the performance,” he said. “That is the way we want to use it. The Champions League final is entertainment that goes beyond soccer. It’s not only for the people in the stadium. It’s for the global audience. The stadium is important, people witnessing the show live, but we are talking about 150 million people watching around the world, and we have to find the balance.”

As far as many fans are concerned, though, that balance has been tilted too far one way. Those final few minutes before kickoff are precious, according to Ronan Evain, executive director of Football Supporters Europe, an umbrella body for fans.

Many teams — as Cabello discovered — use those last moments before the match to sing their own hymnals, to offer paeans of praise to their heroes and to commune with one another, or to expel nervous energy by casting a rich assortment of aspersions against their opponents. These are important traditions, and ones they do not want to be interrupted, no matter what they might think of Lenny Kravitz.

“The people in charge need to consider the overall atmosphere in the stadium, so that when the atmosphere is at its peak, the musical act does not cover it,” Mr. Evain said. That is in the interests of the audience at home, too, he said: They are just as likely to be tuning in for that organic, familiar sound of fans in full voice as they are for a still largely unexpected concert.

The boos, then, are a way of objecting to this unwanted intrusion onto what they view as their sacred space. The only way for the performing artist to avoid being caught in the crossfire is to add to, rather than detract from, that atmosphere.

“I knew it was not about me,” Oceana said of her performance in 2012. “It was about the song.”

By the time she performed at the final, in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, her song “Endless Summer” had already made the leap from official tournament song to mainstream success. She recalled that most of the stadium seemed to know the words. “Mick Jagger always said that people don’t sing along to songs they like, they sing along to songs they know,” she said.

She is also convinced that the location helped. “I’d performed a lot in Ukraine, and it was the first time that there had been that kind of big international event in Kyiv,” she said. “People were proud to be part of this opening up to the West. It was a way of saying that they loved the same things the rest of Europe does: soccer, and pop music, and having fun.”

There was only one real downside, she said. “I’d always toured a lot in France,” she said. “But with a more soulful, acoustic vibe. They heard ‘Endless Summer’ and they were like: ‘Why are you singing this commercial stuff? What is this pop song?’”

Still, 12 years on, Oceana is one of the rare artists to have taken on the riskiest gig in music and made it a success. She only has happy memories of the song, the summer and the final. She is still asked to perform it now, and she still accepts, with gusto.