2026 World Cup: Why chants dominate soccer … and why Americans are so terrible at them
The world's soccer fans are coming to America's beloved NFL stadiums, and they're bringing their drums, their scarves, and — most of all — their chants. Intricate, melodic multi-verse chants, sung in rough full-throated unison loud enough to overwhelm any feeble attempt at "U-S-A!" And we Americans will cheer for our guys in red, white and blue, and maybe we'll manage a "Ref you suck!" every now and then, but all the while we'll be looking over at the chanting masses from beyond our borders and think, That sure looks like fun. Chants are the lifeblood of soccer (or football, whichever) fandom, a communal expression of joy, sorrow, exultation, grief and humor — sometimes all at once. Every culture has its chants, but soccer has codified them into a vast, rich foundation of community. The brilliant, exhaustive website FanChants has catalogued tens of thousands of chants — Manchester United alone have 574 different ones. Chants can be deeply affecting, like Liverpool's "You'll Never Walk Alone," or deeply ridiculous, like "We Lose Every Week," chanted to deflate the latest club to knock off the home lads. ("You're nothing special, we lose every week" — the implication also being that we're loyal enough to keep coming back despite all the losing.) For so many reasons, though, the chant culture just hasn't taken hold in America. Just as there's a gulf between the United States men's team and the titans of the sport — Argentina, Spain, France, Brazil — on the pitch, there's a gulf in the stands, too. Naturally, an old tweet put it best:American sports fans: De-fense! De-fense!British sports fans: All right lads, I've just worked up a song to the tune of Debussy's Clair de Lune about an opposing player's drunk driving charge, I'll count us off:So how did we get here? What makes soccer chants so compelling to the rest of the world, and so difficult to pull off in America? Swill a pint, get your vocal cords warmed up, and sing along with me … A history of chants from the battlefield to the pitchHumans have a primal need to sing along together, promoting togetherness and camaraderie as a defense against everything from loneliness to foreign armies. Soldiers, in particular, have sung chants since the days of the ancient Greeks. Wartime chants — "Yankee Doodle" in the Revolutionary War, "Battle Hymn of the Republic" — are still used as the musical foundation for soccer chants all over the world. In recent decades, popular music, from "You'll Never Walk Alone" to "Country Roads," has inspired chants in stadiums located a long way from West Virginia. Giles Barkwill, the co-founder of FanChants, notes that three elements combine to make a perfect chant: the tune, the content and the support of the home team. "You'll hear chants sung about past players that weren't even that good, because it was a catchy chant that the fans loved at the time and still love singing to this day," he says. A chant will stick around "if it's doing a job, having a go at a player, getting the crowd going or is just plain funny." For example, Man United fans still sing this on occasion about former player Johnny O'Shea:When Johnny goes marching down the wing, O'Shea, O'Shea When Johnny goes marching down the wing, O'Shea, O'Shea When Johnny goes marching down the wing, The Stretford end will f***ing sing We all know that Johnny is gonna score.Plus chanting is the ultimate, and literal, crowd-sourced art form. "It's something decided at that moment on the terraces (the grandstands, in American terms) when somebody starts a chant," Barkwill says. "Either others join in and it has a chance to become a regular chant during the season, or it's consigned to the dustbin, never to be repeated again.""There's a community connection element, wanting to help your team and feel like you're playing a part in the spectacle, rather than just be a passive consumer of it," says Andrew Lawn, author of the 2020 book "We Lose Every Week: The History of Football Chanting." "You're actually involved in the game and you have some kind of agency over what happens on pitch."Lawn also adds a note familiar to American non-soccer fans: "Soccer as a game is not always 100% exciting. It's not just like constant action, action, action. There's an element of kind of entertaining yourself within the broader entertainment of the game."Play 2026 Soccer Pick 'Em with FOX One and make your picks for the world's biggest soccer tournamentFor clubs' supporters, chants are a form of self-expression and self-definition, allowing those in the stands to hold forth on their club, their opponent, their own lives, their communities, their eras, and more. The list of examples is as long as the list of clubs in the world; Barkwill cites a few of the notable examples: Supporters of St. Pauli of Germany, for instance, take pride in their poor working-class roots, proudly claiming to be "anti-social ticks" who "sleep under bridges." Fans of Brazil's Vasco de Gama chant about their legacy of standing up to racism. Others will air their grievances with the current political administration or club leadership in a method that's much catchier than a "Sell the team" banner tugged behind a plane. Grant Thomas/Yahoo SportsPlay 2026 Soccer Pick 'Em with FOX One and make your picks for the world's biggest soccer tournamentBut chants don't have to be quite so serious. Manchester City's former striker Mario Balotelli earned his own chant after a range of incidents that included an allergic reaction to grass and a fine for throwing darts at other players in the team facility. "You're not fit to referee" is the more melodic version of "Ref you suck!" And Grimsby fans, hailing from a town known for its fishing, simply clap and shout "Fish!"Chants were once the exclusive province of their own small stadiums and localities, but no longer. "Now you will have songs at English football grounds that have come from Argentina or Italy or Spain or anywhere else in the world, because a good chant is shared on the internet, and anyone anywhere can see it and then take it to their ground and sing it," Lawn says. "If it's really catchy and it's got a great tune and people enjoy singing it, then they can catch on anywhere in the world."Which raises an obvious question: Americans have all these same hopes, dreams, fears and beliefs about their home towns and their opponents. Americans have a world-shaping musical heritage, plenty of brilliant professional and amateur humorists, and access to YouTube. So why can't we seem to come up with these kinds of chants?American chants: A "Loser Mentality"?Sadly, the chant style of nimble, bold, on-the-fly creativity seems out of reach for most American audiences. One of the United States' current thought leaders, a gentleman by the name of Jason Kelce, dug in on the idea of America's woeful soccer chants last year:"I do remember distinctly thinking how much better, watching soccer, Brazilians were than Americans," Kelce said on his "New Heights" podcast. "You go to the World Cup as an American, and they're like, 'I believe that we can win. I believe that we can win.' … That is the most loser-mentality chant I have ever heard in my life." Kelce's suggestion for an alternative — "I believe that we can f*** you up" — may or may not catch on, but at least it's got a bit more heft and attitude. So why can't the United States seem to do anything more sophisticated than belting out "U-S-A"? Pick a reason, and you're probably on target. To start, games in the NFL are closer to Marvel movies, bombarding fans with spectacle and pre-recorded music. Yes, we can manage to sing the "Da-da-daaah" refrain of "Sweet Caroline" roughly on the beat, and a few fanbases can nail most of the first lines of "Mr. Brightside," ("Comin' out of my cage and I'll be doing just fine … ") but those aren't really our songs, now are they? "There's a massive difference between going to a soccer match as a consumer and kind of expecting to be entertained, and going to a soccer match as a fan, where you might be entertained, you might not," Lawn says. "But that isn't the point. The point is not the product. The point is the communion and the community."Plus, there's an element of insecurity in our national character that doesn't lend itself to chanting. Americans in this era tend to be thin-skinned, happy to mock opponents but all sensitive and up in our feelings when we get mocked ourselves. (You'll never hear a "We lose every week"-style declaration from an American fanbase.) Until we can see the humor in getting our butts kicked, we'll never be able to match the carefree joy of European supporter chants. "I think it comes down to heritage more than anything," Barkwill says. "As Europeans we're brought up on the terraces — you grow up listening to these songs, and they've been filtered over decades, some over a hundred years: That one's good, that one's not, let's keep that one. The same tunes get used over and over. America just hasn't had that long process yet.""The U.S. has had a serious top-flight (soccer) league for maybe 30 years. That's just not long enough yet," says Michael Dennis, FanChants CEO. "And here's the odd bit: this is a country that's given the world some of its greatest music. The raw material is all there. It's the football tradition underneath it that's young."The closest American analogue to international soccer — at least for now — is college football, where generational tribalism reigns. College football has the same hyper-local deep-rooted character as, say, English soccer; students today with deep family ties to a university are almost certainly walking the same campus, going to the same stadium, and hearing the same anthems as their grandparents and great-grandparents did. As a result, the college football chants persist through the generations, too. Think, say, Ole Miss's "Hotty Toddy," call-and-responses like "We Are Penn State," "Boomer Sooner," and "Rock Chalk Jayhawk," or Florida State's Seminole wordless-but-still-powerful war chant. "I believe that we will win," the Kelce-hated USMNT anthem dating back to 2014, actually began life as a college football chant — at Navy, of all places, back in 1999. There's a growing, vocal contingent of American soccer fans looking to bring the chant vibe to our shores. The American Outlaws, the USMNT's most active supporter network, runs an entire chant-based operation throughout every United States match. And several MLS teams helpfully post the lyrics and proper in-game moments for their chants. It's a noble effort, and one that pays off if enough supporters are into it, even if there's something a little odd about pledging your life to a club that began in, oh, 2017. In the end, though, chants are about authenticity, and you can't buy or speed-run authenticity. There's something charmingly authentic about singing in a century-old stadium with overcrowded concourses, too-small seats and nasty restrooms that just doesn't translate to America's sleek, multibillion-dollar football palaces. Chants are best done over pints, not in luxury suites. So this year during the World Cup, give a listen to the other nations' chants, and see if you can find a tune you like. Sit on it until the fall, then whip up a few new lines about the opposing team's struggling quarterback or diva wide receiver. Get a few of your crew to sing along, preferably after a couple beers. Sure, most of your section will look at you like you've lost your mind. But one or two might just start singing with you. And then one or two more. And before long, you've got yourself a new tradition. That's how it starts …
Arabic
French
Spanish
Portuguese
Deutsch
Turkish
Dutch
Italiano
Russian
Romaian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Greek