Ed Sheeran Surprises Pokémon World Championships With Celestial and the Original Anime Theme

Ed Sheeran opened the closing ceremony of the 2026 Pokémon World Championships with a surprise performance, playing his 2022 single "Celestial" and then an acoustic cover of the original Pokémon anime theme song.

The performance took place on Championship Sunday — the finals day of the 2026 World Championships, held at the Chase Center in San Francisco. Sheeran arrived on stage to pyrotechnics and smoke, performing "Celestial" accompanied by on-stage animations, according to VGC. He then shifted to a stripped-back acoustic rendition of the anime theme that introduced Pokémon to millions of television viewers in the late 1990s — the English-language opening whose chorus begins "I wanna be the very best."

Sheeran's connection to the franchise goes back to 2022, when The Pokémon Company announced "Celestial" alongside a music video showing the singer interacting with Pokémon including Pikachu. The song went on to feature in the end credits of Pokémon Scarlet and Violet, the main-series games released on Nintendo Switch that November. So when he walked out at Worlds, he was returning to a collaboration that already had a home in the games themselves.

A YouTube video titled "Ed Sheeran as the Guest performer in the closing Ceremony for Pokemon World Championship 2026!" documents the performance for anyone who missed it.

After Sheeran left the stage, Tsunekazu Ishihara — the CEO of The Pokémon Company — took over to introduce a slate of announcements, according to Screen Rant and OpenCritic. Among them was the first teaser trailer for Pokémon Tales: The Misadventures of Sirfetch'd & Pichu, a stop-motion series produced with Aardman — the British animation studio behind Wallace & Gromit — and headed to Disney+ the following year.

For a franchise that began as a pair of Game Boy cartridges in 1996, the evening captured how broadly Pokémon now reaches: a pop star with stadium-filling audiences, a heritage anime theme that still lands as a singalong, a stop-motion series bound for one of the world's largest streaming platforms, and a competitive tournament filling an NBA arena. The Worlds stage has hosted musical guests before, but Sheeran's set carried the weight of a genuine crossover — a chart-topping artist whose own Pokémon tie-in track made the performance feel less like a booking and more like a homecoming.