SAFF kicks off its party before the guests arrive

It danced, it pranced, as the music boomed throughout a half-empty National Stadium, and even after it stopped.

The opening ceremony of the SAFF Championship 2026 took place on Thursday evening, after the opening fixture had already ended.

An India-Pakistan tie kicked off the tournament at 3:30 PM. But the opening ceremony was left out for later, in a bid to have it before hosts Bangladesh’s match against Bhutan, which begins at 8:00 PM.

The delayed opening ceremony made sense, as the organisers wanted to do the show under artificial lights and also in front of a bigger crowd, who will come to watch the home side.

However, then the organisers decided to begin the ceremony at 6:00 PM, exactly two hours before the match.

The fans were still trickling in, and the stands looked mostly empty as the light show started the ceremony.

The musical act followed. Dola Rahman, Moidul Islam Khan and Asif Irteza, the artists who have sung the anthem of the SAFF Championship 2026, performed. Hundreds of dancers in glitzy get up, danced around them and for a few minutes, the performers tried their best to entertain the stands, which were all half-empty.

Even FIFA tries to keep the opening ceremony as close to the kick-off as possible, in order to avoid exactly this.

In the 2026 FIFA World Cup, three opening ceremonies were held, one each in every host country. All of them started exactly 90 minutes before the match.

Usually, the time difference is even less, as the 2022 World Cup opening ceremony began 60 minutes prior to the match, and the Russia edition in 2018 started just 30 minutes beforehand.

Coming back to the first musical performance, while the audience were mostly motionless, beside the dugout, there was one tiny thing dancing like there is no tomorrow.

It was a robot, a humanoid of sorts, built by Tecno – the sponsors of the event – which walked out to the dugout and began dancing as the performance began.

It kept dancing even after the performance ended, perhaps someone forgot to switch it off.

Sanjoy – a Bangladeshi-American artist – then performed, and fireworks followed. It was a decent opening ceremony, which was handicapped by its timing.