When Andrea Bocelli’s voice rose with Nessun Dorma at last night’s FIFA World Cup 2026 draw, time quietly folded in on itself.
I was carried back to that long, golden, unforgettable summer of 1990, when Luciano Pavarotti’s soaring tenor first wrapped football in poetry and made me fall in love with the game in a way words could barely contain.
Nessun Dorma was never written for football. Yet in #Italia90, football claimed it: gently, irrevocably, and turned it into something eternal. From that moment on, the song ceased to belong only to the opera house: it became the heartbeat of packed stadiums, tearful anthems, late nights, and lifelong dreams.
It forged a quiet, romantic bond between the game and fans like us, a bond that lives beyond goals and trophies. And every time it returns, especially on the grandest stage of all, it reminds us that football is not just played or watched, it is felt, at a rhythm all its own, on the Greatest Show on Earth.
Thank You
Faisal Caesar
