The World Cup is on, and those who choose to indulge their football fever on Spotify will find that playing items from the World’s Game shelf will result in a gaggle of tiny football players invading their scrubber to perform some tricks. There are a ton of different animations that can crop up, featuring various numbers of players doing all sorts of things. They stand on your song’s progress bar, or scrubber, and disappear when touched. They’ll only appear when you’re listening to curated content from the World’s Game shelf, and it’s worth noting that they won’t appear on the scrubber for video content; they’re not looking to interrupt your video, after all, they just want to play a tiny game of football.
The World’s Game shelf includes exclusive video content created just for Spotify, as well as a number of playlists centered around the World Cup and all of the cultures that participate in it. Among the playlists, you’ll find the blood-pumping Jock Jams, the fancy “Footwork Fever”, and a playlist called “Fit as a Footballer”, created by champion player Brandi Chastain, among others. You can also simply shuffle the World’s Game shelf on the whole as if it were one giant playlist, and you’ll still get the little players on your scrubber. They bounce balls on their heads, kick the ball around with one another, and even play a short and understaffed game right on your scrubber, among tons of other actions.
Spotify is no stranger to world culture, and especially to the World Cup, though it’s easy to argue that this newest effort is unique and rather quirky. It’s also a bit of a departure from the app’s normal celebrations of big events, which are almost always mostly limited to curated playlists to fit the event at hand. The World Cup is already well underway for this year, and has been since the middle of June, so the tiny footballers in your scrubber are a bit late to the party. Spotify did not say when the animations will go away, but if they’re not a permanent fixture of World Cup hype playlists going forward, they’ll most likely leave when the event ends on July 15.