Content Guide
Football and Music: Before a big match, there is a moment that is almost impossible to explain to someone who has never experienced it. You are in your seat, or maybe you are still outside the ground, and the noise starts building before you even get through the turnstile. Someone nearby starts a chant, low at first, then it ripples outward like a stone dropped in water, and suddenly sixty thousand people are doing the same thing in perfect time. That is not sport. That is music. It just does not have a stage.
Football and music have been intertwined for so long that most of us have stopped noticing it. We treat them like two separate worlds that occasionally bump into each other at a charity gig or a World Cup ceremony. But the truth is far more interesting than that. These two things were built from the same raw material: crowd energy, rhythm, identity, and the desperate human need to belong to something bigger than yourself.
The Terraces Were Always a Stage (Football and Music)
Before all-seater stadiums became the norm in England after 1994, the standing sections of football grounds were genuinely musical spaces. They were loud, cramped, heaving bodies pressed together, and the chants that came out of those spaces were works of real creativity. Fans took popular songs and rewrote them completely. They turned Top 40 hits into very specific, very brutal commentary about opposition players. They turned folk songs into declarations of love for their club. Nobody was getting paid for this. Nobody was in a recording studio. And yet some of those chants became more famous than the original songs they were built on.
Take “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Gerry and the Pacemakers had a hit with it in 1963, and within months it had been adopted by Liverpool fans on the Kop. The song has now been sung at Anfield for over sixty years. It is longer in its second life as a football anthem than it ever was as a pop single. Gerry Marsden himself said late in his life that he felt the song had found its true home at Anfield. That is a songwriter admitting that sixty thousand people on a cold Tuesday night in November did more with his song than he ever could.
That is not a small thing.
Punk, Football, and the Same Scream (Football and Music)
The relationship runs both ways though, and that is where it gets really interesting. Football has influenced music just as much as music has influenced football culture. Think about the working class communities that produced both the British punk explosion of the late 1970s and the most passionate football support in the world. They were the same people.
The kids on the terraces on Saturday were the same kids going to the Marquee Club or the Roxy on Friday night. The energy was identical. The need to scream something out loud, to be part of a collective roar, to feel something visceral in your chest. Punk and football were not parallel movements. They were the same movement in different clothes.
Ian Curtis of Joy Division was a Manchester City fan. Morrissey of The Smiths wrote with a nostalgia that could only have come from someone who grew up going to grounds in the 1960s and 70s, watching football as a working class ritual. Noel Gallagher is so famously devoted to Manchester City that it has become part of his public identity, but that is not celebrity posturing.
That is a man from Burnage, Manchester, carrying the thing that defined his youth wherever he goes. When Oasis played Knebworth in 1996 in front of 250,000 people over two nights, the atmosphere was described by journalists at the time as closer to a football match than a concert. That was not accidental. It was the sound of a generation that had grown up on terraces.
Brazil Understood It First (Football and Music)
Outside of England, the connection is just as deep, just as personal.
In Brazil, football and music share the same heartbeat. Literally. The rhythms of samba have influenced the way Brazilian football is played, the way players move, the way teams celebrate. People have written whole academic papers trying to prove this, and honestly, you do not need the papers. Just watch footage of the great Brazilian sides from the 1970s, then put on some samba, and you can feel it. The hips. The weight transfer. The improvisation. These are not footballers who also like music. These are people for whom music and movement are already the same thing, and football is where they express it.
The Ultras Invented Something Nobody Has a Name For (Football and Music)
Ultras culture in Italy took this even further. The ultras of the 1970s and 80s borrowed directly from political protest movements, from carnival traditions, from military displays. The choreography, the flags, the coordinated chanting, the drums that could be heard from outside the ground before a ball was kicked. That is not just support. That is performance art with no budget and no director. The ultras invented entire visual and musical languages to express devotion to their clubs. Some of those displays are genuinely stunning, the kind of thing you would pay serious money to see in a theatre, except they happen in the rain in Genoa on a Wednesday.
How Hip Hop Changed American Sport Forever (Football and Music)
American sports got here differently but they got here too. The NFL and the NBA now treat halftime shows and pregame performances as standalone events. The Super Bowl halftime show is at this point one of the biggest music events in the world by viewing figures. Beyoncé, Prince, Eminem, Kendrick Lamar — the list of artists who have performed at halftime reads like a Hall of Fame shortlist.
For a long time American sports and music coexisted politely but separately. Then somewhere in the late 1980s and 1990s, hip hop moved into basketball and the two became genuinely inseparable. Rappers became courtside fixtures. Players started rapping. The crossover became total, cultural, commercial, and deeply genuine all at once. It was not a marketing strategy. It was two communities recognising themselves in each other.
The Merger Nobody Planned (Football and Music)
Now here we are in 2026 and the connection is more visible than it has ever been. Players arrive at grounds to their own curated playlists, songs they have chosen specifically, and fans know those songs and sing them back. Pre-match warmup playlists at Premier League grounds are discussed and debated online. Clubs have Spotify pages. Players release music. Rappers own clubs. The worlds have not just merged, they have fused.
And yet there is something being lost in all the visibility, and I think it is worth saying out loud.
The Most Honest Music Left on Earth (Football and Music)
The raw, unrehearsed, completely unsponsored music that happens in a football crowd is still the most exciting version of this connection. When a stadium full of people who have never met each other suddenly find the same rhythm, the same melody, the same words, and sing them all at once with complete abandon, that is something no festival, no arena tour, no perfectly engineered Super Bowl show can replicate. It is communal music in its most honest form. Nobody rehearsed it. Nobody got paid for it. Nobody is trying to go viral.
A chant starts on one side of the ground and three minutes later the whole stadium is doing it and nobody can tell you exactly how it spread. That is what music was before recording existed. That is what it sounded like in village squares and church halls and political meetings when the only way to share a song was to sing it directly to another person and hope they remembered it.
Football kept that alive. In the middle of everything modern, in among the sponsorship deals and the broadcast rights and the transfer fees that sound like telephone numbers, football kept the oldest form of music breathing.
Sing As Loud As You Can (Football and Music)
The next time you are in a ground and a chant breaks out, close your eyes for a second before you join in. Listen to the shape of it. Feel the rhythm before you find the words. You are not just watching a football match. You are standing in the middle of a tradition that is thousands of years old, dressed up in replica shirts, and it is genuinely one of the most remarkable things that human beings still do together.
Then open your eyes, find the words, and sing as loud as you can.
He discovered the gem when he was 12 years old and still has it now, claiming it to be why he fell in love with music. He likes to play disc golf when he's not writing about music. He is a one-of-a-kind individual who is always the first to bust out his air guitar on the dance-floor.
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