There’s a glaring oversight in Shakira-Burna Boy World Cup song ‘Dai Dai’.

‘Dai Dai’, the official song for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, has got football fans grooving within a day of release. The track, a blend of Shakira’s lively Latin pop and Nigerian singer Burna Boy’s Afrobeats, will surely be heard across the globe throughout the World Cup, starting June 11, and beyond.

The multilingual song borrows words from as many as five languages. ‘Dai Dai’ is Italian for ‘come on, come on’, while the lyric finely blends in the Japanese word ‘Ikou’, meaning Let’s Go, and the Spanish word ‘Dale’ and the French term ‘Allez’, with similar meanings.

The story of the song centres around the 'highs and lows' that one goes through to write their story, about living the dream at the top of one's game and reminding everyone that 'what broke you once made you strong'. It resonates with the World Cup story, of upsets, near misses, heartbreaks, resilience and glory.

The internet has been dissecting the lyrics and assigning numerous meanings. Some see the lines, 'We’ve taken all that our hearts can hold. We can’t hold on to the past no more', as a dual metaphor, one telling a player or a team to shake off their past failures and try again.

The other meaning is seen as more personal, with an alleged reference to Shakira's 2022 breakup with Spanish footballer Gerard Pique after 11 years together.

Toward the end, the song pays tribute to a handful of former and current superstars such as Pele, Maradona, Maldini, Romario, Cristiano, Ronaldo, El Pibe (Valderrama), Iniesta, Beckham, Kaka, Messi, Mbappe and Salah.

The song goes on to musically list 14 countries, and it is unclear why these nations were picked or why they were used in a specific order. The countries mentioned in the lyrics are Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Colombia, the US, England, Germany, France, South Africa, Spain, Mexico, Japan, Korea, and the Netherlands.

There’s nothing distinctive about the nations mentioned other than that they have all competed in World Cups; at least 66 other countries have also competed across the editions, but they are not mentioned in the song.

If the argument is that they represent the various continents or regions, it can't be true either because there is no Australia or any nation from the Oceania zone. Now, this is where it gets tricky: while the song mentions the US and Mexico, there is no Canada. Considering the upcoming World Cup is the first to be co-hosted by three countries (with Canada being the third), it could be said that the omission of the North American nation was a glaring oversight on the part of the songwriters, or are we missing something else?