Katy Perry brought 10-year-old Norwegian singer Tius Luka on stage to perform their duet 'Wonder' at the U.S. opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on Friday, June 12, 2026, ten minutes before the United States kicked off against Paraguay. Rolling Stone covered the moment, reporting that Perry wore a glittering silver dress, the duo performed surrounded by flags from competing nations, and Perry lifted Tius into an embrace as the song ended and the stadium crowd surged into the kickoff.
Perry framed the collaboration in an Instagram post the morning of the ceremony, explaining how the duet came together:
I heard his vocal in 2023 and was inspired to write the verses for 'Wonder' and added it to my sixth album.
She continued: "Tius is 10 now and flew all the way to LA from Norway to sing this song with me." The studio version of the song appeared on Perry's 2024 album 143, with Tius having recorded his vocal portion at age 5 in 2021 — a five-year gap between the original take and the live duet that turned a vocal sample into a cross-generational stadium moment.
The Los Angeles ceremony was the second of three FIFA World Cup openers staged across the tournament's three host nations, following Toronto's Friday-afternoon ceremony for Canada-Bosnia and preceding Shakira's slot earlier in the week at the Mexico City opener. Perry's selection for the U.S. ceremony placed her at the center of a tournament that organizers have explicitly designed as a cultural showcase as much as a sporting one.
The choice of 'Wonder' is the more interesting beat. The track was widely regarded as a deep cut from 143 — the album posted Perry's softest commercial reception in a decade — and was never serviced to radio. Reviving it as the ceremonial centerpiece, with the original child vocalist present, repositions the song as a marker rather than a chart play, and reads as Perry leaning into the post-radio segment of her catalog deliberately.
Tius Luka is the through-line. He was discovered by Norwegian producers in 2021 when he was five, his vocals on what would become 'Wonder' were reportedly captured in a single take, and he has since released a handful of independent tracks in Norwegian-language children's pop. His SoFi appearance is the largest live audience he has played to by several orders of magnitude, and the only one to date with a global broadcast footprint.
Perry's Friday set list itself was structured around the duet. She arrived to a curtain reveal in the silver dress, performed the chorus alone before Tius emerged, and handed off the final phrasing to him before the lift — a sequence that has already become the most shared World Cup-ceremony clip of the opening week on TikTok and Instagram. The broadcast cut to a wide shot of the flags during the lift, which crowd footage shows was the moment the stadium's reaction peaked.
What happens between now and the tournament final on July 19 is where the question of whether the moment carries beyond the ceremony resolves. Perry has hinted that further collaborations with Tius are planned, and the streaming bump on 'Wonder' through Friday and Saturday morning will be the first numeric read on whether the moment converted into catalog momentum. The FIFA broadcast partnership and the visual register Perry built around the duet position the song for a second commercial life that the 2024 release cycle did not deliver.
