Canada stepped into the 2026 World Cup spotlight on Friday in Toronto with an opening ceremony built around Alanis Morissette and Michael Bublé before the first match against Bosnia and Herzegovina. Morissette sang the national anthem to a cheering crowd, and Bublé later joined a choir and led fans in the stands through Bring It on Home to Me.
For Canadian fans packed into Toronto Stadium, the night started before kickoff. They arrived in a sea of red and broke into an impromptu O Canada as they entered, turning the buildup into a celebration of a tournament that has already begun across the continent. Thursday’s opener in Mexico City featured Shakira and Burna Boy, and later on Friday the first U.S. game in Los Angeles brought performances from Katy Perry and Future, underscoring how the 2026 tournament is being staged across all three host countries.
The Toronto ceremony also pulled in a wider cast that organisers said reflected Canada’s communities and diversity, including Alessia Cara, Elyanna, Jessie Reyes, Nora Fatehi and William Prince, an Indigenous artist from Manitoba. In the stadium, the announcer asked the crowd to join in a round of applause for peace, a brief reminder that the spectacle was being staged against a tournament billed as the largest ever, with 48 nations competing.
That scale mattered to Bosnian supporters in the building. Layla Mesic said she was there with her Canadian mother and wore Bosnia’s yellow and blue, and her words carried the weight of a team that does not get many nights like this. Some Bosnian fans said they had traveled from their home country to watch their team play in the World Cup for the first time since 2014, a rarity that made even a Friday group-stage match feel more like a pilgrimage than a routine fixture. Mesic said qualifying alone was a point of pride, and added that she was “100% Bosnian” for the night, even if the trip had “cost an arm and a leg.”
What the opening ceremony could not answer was the only question that will matter by the end of the evening: how Bosnia and Herzegovina handled the match itself. Canada got the pageantry, the anthem and the home-crowd lift. The result was still to come.
