Way 45 Is Portugal’s Rafael Leão, and He’s Bringing Rap to the World Cup Quietly

The overlap between soccer and music is older than the curated playlists players share on social media. Pelé wrote and released songs into his eighties. Former Croatia defender Slaven Bilić played in the heavy-metal band Rawbau. John Barnes, the first Black player to represent England at a World Cup, rapped on New Order’s “World in Motion.” Every major tournament peels back a few more of these parallel careers.

This year, the spotlight lands on Portugal’s Rafael Leão. The AC Milan forward, a reliable piece of the national team’s attack, has spent the last few years building a quiet discography under the name Way 45. Across three albums — Beginning, My Life in Each Verse, and last year’s 12:12 — he works through a blend of R&B, hip-hop, and stripped-back trap production. The songs return often to his childhood outside Lisbon, and to the private self the pitch doesn’t reveal.

“There was always music in my house growing up,” he told Rolling Stone U.K. in 2023. “My uncle was a DJ, and my father used to sing too. It was always hip-hop I’d listen to, and I could relate to the message they’d put across about growing up in the hood.”

Leão describes himself as shy. The music gives him a different kind of release. “Music means to me love, escaping my troubles, and finding myself,” he said in a club-produced video where he performs one of his own songs at a piano. The disconnect between the athlete made for public consumption and the hesitant artist working after hours isn’t dramatic. It’s just there, a small set of records made by someone who needed them. At a tournament built for spectacle, that kind of off-center devotion has its own weight.