The Music of Women’s Football: How Music Shaped – and Was Shaped By – the Sport’s Greatest Cultural Revolution, is the third episode of a three-part series exploring the music that has put soccer or football at the center of world pop culture, in the lead up to the FIFA World Cup 2026.
The men’s FIFA World Cup has had an official song since 1962. The Women’s World Cup didn’t get its first official anthem until 2023 — sixty-one years later. That gap, that silence, is the story.
In the climactic episode of Uncovering the Cover’s World Cup music trilogy, host Diego Pinzón traces how women’s football built its own soundtrack from scratch — in the spaces the music industry left empty. From the 1972 passage of Title IX in the United States (which took American girls’ high school soccer participation from 700 players to over 400,000), through Brandi Chastain’s 1999 World Cup celebration at the Rose Bowl (where a 30-year-old Jennifer Lopez performed “Let’s Get Loud” as her own breakthrough moment), through the chants of “EQUAL PAY!” at the 2019 final that helped force a landmark settlement with U.S. Soccer, through the haunting sixth-minute silent protest of October 2021 that stopped every NWSL match in solidarity with abused players, through the Lionesses’ unforgettable Euro 2022 Sweet Caroline moment with Chloe Kelly, through Spain’s 2023 World Cup victory — and the “Se Acabó” movement that engulfed it after a federation president’s non-consensual kiss — to the first-ever official Women’s World Cup song.
This is a story about Title IX, about equal pay, about the National Women’s Soccer League and its reckoning, about Marta, about the Matildas’ obsession with a 2001 Australian pop song, and about how women’s football, denied the official soundtrack of the men’s game for sixty-one years, built one of the most authentic music cultures in modern sport. It is the story of the songs women made along the way, when nobody made the songs for them.
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Social-First Cold Open
[Open cold. A stadium PA system warming up. Distant chant. Tape hiss.]
The FIFA Men’s World Cup has had an official song since 1962.
The Women’s World Cup didn’t get one until 2023.
[Beat.]
Sixty-one years of silence.
That is the gap. That is the story.
[Beat.]
In 1999, ninety thousand people packed the Rose Bowl for the Women’s World Cup final. Forty million Americans watched on television. A young Jennifer Lopez performed the very first single of her solo career, “Let’s Get Loud,” on the same stage that night. And a 31-year-old defender named Brandi Chastain scored the winning penalty, ripped off her shirt, and changed the course of women’s sports forever.
FIFA did not commission an official song for that World Cup.
Not in 1999. Not in 2003. Not in 2007. Not in 2011. Not in 2015. Not in 2019.
[Beat.]
But the women played anyway. And along the way, they built one of the most extraordinary music cultures in modern sport — entirely in the spaces the industry left empty.
They sang Sweet Caroline at Wembley when their captain ran off a live BBC interview to join the chorus.
They chanted “EQUAL PAY!” at the top of their lungs in the Stade de Lyon while their federation president fumbled through an apology.
They stopped every National Women’s Soccer League match in October 2021, at exactly the sixth minute, for sixty seconds of silence — in honor of the six years it had taken for the abuse allegations of two former players to finally be heard.
In Australia, they made an entire nation obsessed with a 2001 children’s pop song called “Strawberry Kisses.”
In Spain, after winning their first World Cup, they didn’t celebrate. They protested. Eighty-one players refused to play for their country. The slogan that lit up Spanish social media was two words. “Se acabó.” It’s over.
[Music shifts. Cold open closing.]
Today, the women’s game has finally been handed the official soundtrack the men’s game has had for sixty-one years.
But the music that actually defined the rise of women’s football wasn’t the song they were given.
It was the songs they took for themselves. The songs they chanted. The songs they survived to. The songs they forced the world to listen to.
And those songs — those unauthorized, unscheduled, unstoppable songs — are the real soundtrack of the greatest cultural revolution in modern sport.
[Transition to standard intro.]
Welcome to Uncovering the Cover, the podcast that explores the hidden stories behind music’s greatest transformations. Today, we have the story of the music of women’s football — a story about Title IX and Sweet Caroline, equal pay and the sixth minute, “Se acabó” and “Strawberry Kisses,” and how the songs the music industry refused to write for women’s football ended up shaping one of the most powerful cultural revolutions of the modern era.
3. Full Episode Script
Target runtime: 34–40 minutes. Cold open + three acts + outro. Italicized brackets indicate stage directions. Hook boxes mark high-virality clip moments for short-form video extraction.
Cold Open
[Stadium PA warming up. Distant chant. Tape hiss.]
The FIFA Men’s World Cup has had an official song since 1962. The Women’s World Cup didn’t get one until 2023.
Sixty-one years of silence. That is the gap. That is the story.
In 1999, ninety thousand people packed the Rose Bowl for the Women’s World Cup final. Forty million Americans watched on television. A young Jennifer Lopez performed the very first single of her solo career — “Let’s Get Loud” — on the same stage that night. And a 31-year-old defender named Brandi Chastain scored the winning penalty, ripped off her shirt, and changed the course of women’s sports forever. FIFA did not commission an official song for that World Cup. Not in 1999. Not in 2003. Not in 2007. Not in 2011. Not in 2015. Not in 2019.
But the women played anyway. And along the way, they built one of the most extraordinary music cultures in modern sport — entirely in the spaces the industry left empty. They sang Sweet Caroline at Wembley when their captain ran off a live BBC interview to join the chorus. They chanted “EQUAL PAY!” at the top of their lungs in the Stade de Lyon while their federation president fumbled through an apology. They stopped every National Women’s Soccer League match in October 2021, at exactly the sixth minute, for sixty seconds of silence — in honor of the six years it had taken for the abuse allegations of two former players to be heard. In Australia, they made an entire nation obsessed with a 2001 children’s pop song called “Strawberry Kisses.” In Spain, after winning their first World Cup, they didn’t celebrate. They protested. Eighty-one players refused to play for their country. The slogan that lit up Spanish social media was two words. “Se acabó.” It’s over.
Today, the women’s game has finally been handed the official soundtrack the men’s game has had for sixty-one years. But the music that actually defined the rise of women’s football wasn’t the song they were given. It was the songs they took for themselves. The songs they chanted. The songs they survived to. The songs they forced the world to listen to. And those songs — those unauthorized, unscheduled, unstoppable songs — are the real soundtrack of the greatest cultural revolution in modern sport.
Welcome to Uncovering the Cover, the podcast that explores the hidden stories behind music’s greatest transformations. Today, we have the story of the music of women’s football — a story about Title IX and Sweet Caroline, equal pay and the sixth minute, “Se acabó” and “Strawberry Kisses,” and how the songs the music industry refused to write for women’s football ended up shaping one of the most powerful cultural revolutions of the modern era.
[Theme music up and under.]
Act 1 — The Long Silence: Title IX and the Rose Bowl Generation (1972–1999)
HOOK (Act 1 Open — Clip-Ready)
In 1971, the year before Title IX became American law, there were exactly seven hundred girls playing high school soccer in the entire United States. Seven hundred. By 1997, that number had grown to almost 210,000. By 2022, it was nearly 400,000. That is a 56,200% increase in fifty years. There has never been a single piece of American legislation — not the Civil Rights Act, not the Americans With Disabilities Act, not anything — that has changed any single corner of American life this fast and this completely. And every great moment in modern women’s football — every Mia Hamm goal, every Megan Rapinoe celebration, every USWNT World Cup trophy — traces back to a single sentence, written in 1972, in a piece of education law that, technically, was not even about sports.
Title IX of the United States Education Amendments of 1972. Thirty-seven words.
“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
That’s the entire law. It doesn’t mention sports. It doesn’t mention soccer. It doesn’t mention the World Cup. It barely mentions athletics at all.
But because high schools and colleges in the United States receive federal funding, and because schools at the time spent ninety-eight percent of their athletic budgets on boys’ sports, Title IX accidentally became the most consequential piece of women’s sports legislation in human history. Before Title IX, one in twenty-seven American girls played sports. Today, that number is two in five. Before Title IX, there were 294,000 girls playing high school sports nationwide. Today, there are 3.4 million.
And no sport benefited more dramatically than soccer.
Seven hundred high school girls were playing soccer in 1971. By the end of the century, that number was over a quarter of a million. By 2022, the year of the Lionesses’ Euro victory, it was approaching half a million. Soccer was the fastest-growing girls’ sport in American history. And not by a little. By an order of magnitude that nobody in 1972 could have predicted.
Twenty-seven years after Title IX passed, a generation of women who had grown up playing high school and college soccer because of that law walked out onto the Rose Bowl turf in Pasadena, California, for the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup final.
[Music shifts. Lush. Cinematic.]
The 1999 Women’s World Cup was, by any honest accounting, the moment women’s football arrived on the world stage. Ninety thousand one hundred and eighty-five people packed the Rose Bowl. It was the largest crowd ever for a women’s sporting event in the United States. Forty million Americans watched on television. ABC built the broadcast around the spectacle. The whole country, suddenly, paid attention.
And FIFA — still in the early years of treating the women’s tournament as a real event — had figured out something about music that wouldn’t fully reach the men’s side until “La Copa de la Vida” the following year. They booked Jennifer Lopez to perform at the opening ceremony.
Lopez was, at that exact moment, in the middle of the most important career transition of her life. Her debut album, On the 6, had just been released. Her first single, “If You Had My Love,” had hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100. She was making the move from a respected film actress, who had played Selena in the 1997 biopic, into a global pop star. And the song she performed at the Rose Bowl that day — to ninety thousand people in the stadium and forty million on TV — was “Let’s Get Loud.”
The music video for “Let’s Get Loud” was actually filmed at the 1999 World Cup final. Lopez in go-go boots, performing in front of a sold-out Rose Bowl, before the biggest women’s soccer match in history. The song became one of her signature hits. Twenty years later, she would perform it again — at the Super Bowl LIV halftime show, alongside Shakira, in 2020. But its first moment, its real cultural debut, was that day. At the women’s soccer World Cup.
Two careers were quietly being launched at the Rose Bowl that night. Jennifer Lopez’s as a global pop star. And the United States Women’s National Team’s as a cultural institution.
[Beat. Music dips.]
And then came the moment.
HOOK (Mid-Act 1 — Clip-Ready)
At the end of regulation time at the Rose Bowl, the United States and China were tied at zero. The game went to penalties. After Briana Scurry saved the third Chinese kick, the fifth U.S. shooter walked up to the spot. Her name was Brandi Chastain. She had never taken a competitive penalty kick with her left foot in her entire career. The head coach had told her to take it with her left foot anyway. She put the ball away. And in the moment of one of the loudest celebrations in modern sports history, she ripped off her jersey and dropped to her knees, exposing her sports bra to ninety thousand people in the stadium and forty million watching on TV. That image — a woman athlete, mid-scream, mid-celebration, mid-revolution — became the cover of Sports Illustrated. It became, twenty years later, a bronze statue at the Rose Bowl. It is one of the most reproduced sports photographs of the twentieth century. And after that day, in one tiny town in South Dakota that had had about 100 girls playing soccer, the number of girls who signed up the following month was 10,000.
Let’s say that again. One small town in South Dakota. One hundred girls playing soccer before Brandi Chastain’s celebration. Ten thousand the month after. Chastain herself told that story — because she went and visited the town. She saw it with her own eyes.
That is what music does. That is what celebration does. That is what a single image, lit up by stadium music and the deafening roar of a crowd singing along to a Jennifer Lopez song, can do for an entire generation of girls.
A generation of women in their thirties and forties were watching that game in 1999. They had grown up post-Title IX. They had grown up playing high school soccer. They had grown up watching Mia Hamm. And they brought their daughters with them to that World Cup final. Those daughters — Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, Christen Press, Crystal Dunn, Tobin Heath, Carli Lloyd — would go on to become the U.S. team that won World Cups in 2015 and 2019. They would chant for equal pay. They would sue their own federation. They would win.
And in front of them, all the way through that journey, would be the music. Always the music. Sometimes Jennifer Lopez. Sometimes Beyoncé. Sometimes a stadium chant. Sometimes a song no one in marketing had ever heard of.
[Beat.]
Now here’s the thing about the 1999 Women’s World Cup. As cultural as it was. As musical as it was. As big as it was.
FIFA did not commission an official song for it.
They had had an official song for the men’s tournament since 1962. By 1999, they had commissioned official songs for every single men’s World Cup for thirty-seven years. They had handed Daryl Hall and Ricky Martin and the world’s biggest pop stars massive global launches off of those songs. The Latin Explosion, as we covered in Part 1 of this trilogy, was about to happen because of one of them.
But for the women, in 1999 — with the largest crowd in the history of women’s sport, with Jennifer Lopez at the peak of her career performing a brand-new single, with one of the most iconic celebrations in the history of athletics — there was no official song.
And there would not be. Not in 2003 in the United States, after the tournament was emergency-moved from China because of SARS. Not in 2007 in China. Not in 2011 in Germany, even though Germany hosted a tournament that drew massive European audiences. Not in 2015 in Canada, despite the U.S. women winning and bringing American attention back to the sport. Not in 2019 in France, even as women’s football was about to enter the biggest commercial growth phase of its history.
For twenty-four years after the Rose Bowl — from 1999 all the way to 2023 — the most-watched women’s sporting event on Earth would not have its own official soundtrack. FIFA simply did not commission one. But women’s football, locked out of the official music industry that surrounded the men’s tournament, did something incredible in that silence. They built a soundtrack from scratch. They took songs that nobody had given them, and they made them theirs. And the most famous of those songs would, twenty-three years after the Rose Bowl, end up at the center of one of the most extraordinary moments in modern sports history — sung by Chloe Kelly into a BBC microphone, the night the Lionesses won the Euros at Wembley.
[Cliffhanger sting. Ad break or transition.]
Act 2 — The Songs They Made Themselves: From Equal Pay to Sweet Caroline (2015–2023)
HOOK (Act 2 Open — Clip-Ready)
On July 7, 2019, at the Stade de Lyon in France, the United States Women’s National Team beat the Netherlands 2-0 to win their fourth World Cup. Megan Rapinoe scored. Rose Lavelle scored. The team draped themselves in American flags. The Golden Ball trophy was handed out. And then, as the U.S. Soccer Federation president walked onto the field to congratulate Megan Rapinoe, a chant went up from the crowd. It wasn’t “U-S-A!” It wasn’t the players’ names. It was two words. “EQUAL PAY!” The chant echoed around the stadium. It got louder. By the time the federation president opened his mouth to give his speech, the entire stadium was chanting it. Three days later, at the ticker tape parade in New York, the same thing happened again. The chant interrupted the U.S. Soccer president’s speech mid-sentence. That chant — those two words shouted by an entire stadium of fans at the moment their team won the World Cup — became one of the most consequential sports protests in modern American history. And it directly led, three years later, to a $24 million settlement that finally made the United States Women’s National Team’s pay equal to the men’s.
Before we get to “Equal Pay,” let’s tell the story of the song that gave the United States Women’s National Team their unofficial anthem.
In 1998, at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, Rhode Island, two roommates who had grown up watching college sports together came up with a chant. They were freshmen. They were bored. They started saying it before pickup basketball games. “I believe that we will win.” It caught on. By the end of the year, every Navy team was using it. By the early 2000s, it had spread to college sports nationwide.
And then it found its way to the American Outlaws — the supporters group for the U.S. Soccer national teams — in the late 2000s. By 2014, when the U.S. men’s team played at the World Cup in Brazil, “I believe that we will win” was the unofficial anthem of American soccer fans. It traveled to the women’s side. And from 2015 onward, it became the U.S. Women’s National Team’s defining chant. They sang it at every match. They sang it after every win. When the U.S. women won the 2015 World Cup, beating Japan 5-2 in the final in Vancouver, the locker room was singing it. When they won the 2019 World Cup in Lyon, the locker room was singing it. When Pitbull recorded a COVID-19 morale-boost song in 2020, he sampled it. “I Believe That We Will Win” went from a Naval Academy bunkroom in 1998, to American soccer’s defining call-and-response, to a Pitbull single twenty-two years later.
That’s how songs travel when the official channels don’t commission them.
But the chant that actually made history in 2019 wasn’t “I believe that we will win.” It was something even sharper. More specific. More political. Three syllables.
“Equal pay.”
[Beat.]
Here’s the backdrop. The U.S. women had won three World Cups by the end of 2015. Their salaries were a fraction of what the U.S. men were paid. The U.S. men, who had never won a World Cup and had not made it past the round of sixteen in twenty years, were being paid significantly more per game, with significantly better bonuses, with significantly better travel and accommodation, than the women who had won the sport’s biggest trophy four times.
In March 2019, three months before the World Cup, 28 members of the U.S. women’s team — including Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, and Carli Lloyd — filed a federal gender discrimination lawsuit against U.S. Soccer. Their argument was simple: equal work, equal pay.
Four months later, they won the World Cup. And the fans at the Stade de Lyon in France made the politics of the lawsuit unavoidable. They chanted “EQUAL PAY!” the moment U.S. Soccer’s president walked onto the field. They chanted it at the New York City parade. They wore it on T-shirts. They wrote it on signs. They turned a federal lawsuit into a stadium chant. And a stadium chant into a global news story.
In February 2022, U.S. Soccer settled the lawsuit. Twenty-four million dollars, plus a binding commitment to equalize pay for the women’s and men’s national teams going forward. It was the largest equal-pay settlement in the history of American team sports. And it was made possible, at least in part, by the moment a stadium of women’s soccer fans realized they could sing a federal lawsuit into law.
[Beat.]
Now — because we promised at the start of this episode — let’s talk about Sweet Caroline.
HOOK (Mid-Act 2 — Clip-Ready)
Neil Diamond wrote “Sweet Caroline” in a Memphis hotel room in the mid-1960s. He was inspired, he later admitted, by a photograph he’d seen of Caroline Kennedy as a child — the daughter of the assassinated president. The song hit number four on the Billboard charts in 1969. Fifty-three years later, on the night of July 31, 2022, an English defender named Chloe Kelly scored the winning goal in extra time of the Euro 2022 final against Germany. Eighty-seven thousand fans at Wembley sang Sweet Caroline. The Lionesses, on the pitch, sang Sweet Caroline. Chloe Kelly was giving a live interview to the BBC when she heard the song start. She dropped the microphone. She ran across the pitch to join her teammates and sing Sweet Caroline. The song re-entered the UK singles chart that week at number twenty. Neil Diamond himself, who had retired from public performance due to Parkinson’s disease, recorded a video message thanking the Lionesses. The song that put a 31-year-old American man on the music map in 1969, fifty-three years later, became the soundtrack of the moment women’s football finally arrived in England.
The Sweet Caroline story is one of the cleanest cover-song stories in this entire trilogy. Let me trace it.
Neil Diamond, 1969. Memphis hotel room. Inspired by a photograph of a young Caroline Kennedy. Number four on the Billboard Hot 100.
1997. Boston, Massachusetts. A Boston Red Sox employee named Amy Tobey is in charge of music at Fenway Park. A friend of hers has just had a baby and named her Caroline. Tobey plays “Sweet Caroline” during a game in honor of the baby. The crowd starts singing along. She plays it again. They sing again. By 2002, a new Red Sox executive named Charles Steinberg makes it official: Sweet Caroline will be played at every Boston home game, in the middle of the eighth inning. It becomes the team’s anthem.
2013. The Boston Marathon bombings. The first Red Sox home game after the attack — a city in mourning, a stadium in trauma — Neil Diamond shows up unannounced, walks onto the field, and sings Sweet Caroline live to the entire stadium. He doesn’t charge a fee. He just shows up. The song officially becomes more than a Red Sox tradition. It becomes a song about Boston resilience. It becomes a song about grief.
And then in June 2021, eight years later — at the Euro 2020 men’s tournament, which because of COVID was played in 2021 — a DJ named Tony Perry was working the Wembley Stadium PA during England’s match against Germany. England won. The crowd was euphoric. Perry needed to pick a song. He had Fat Les’s “Vindaloo” cued up. He had a few other options. But the match director’s voice came in his earpiece: “let ’em have it, the world’s been closed for eighteen months.”
Perry picked Sweet Caroline.
Sixty thousand English fans — just released from a year and a half of pandemic lockdown — sang along like the country had been holding its breath. They sang it again at the semi-final. They sang it at the final, even as England lost on penalties to Italy. The song became the unofficial anthem of England’s entire summer.
One year later, Euro 2022 was held in England. The women’s tournament. The Lionesses. They had a manager named Sarina Wiegman — a Dutch coach who had won Euro 2017 with the Netherlands — leading them. They beat Norway 8-0 in the group stage. They beat Sweden 4-0 in the semifinal. And on July 31, 2022, at Wembley Stadium, they played Germany in the final. Eighty-seven thousand one hundred and ninety-two people in the stands — a European Championship record for any women’s game ever played.
Ella Toone gave England the lead. Lina Magull equalized for Germany. The game went to extra time. And in the 110th minute, a 24-year-old substitute named Chloe Kelly — who had grown up a bus ride from Wembley in Ealing, who had spent the previous year recovering from a torn ACL — stretched out a leg, toed the ball into the net, and won England their first major football trophy of any kind since 1966.
Kelly ripped off her shirt to celebrate. Almost exactly the way Brandi Chastain had done it twenty-three years earlier at the Rose Bowl. The image went around the world. Brandi Chastain herself sent a public message of congratulations.
And then, on the pitch after the trophy ceremony, the Wembley Stadium DJ — the same one, Tony Perry, who had played Sweet Caroline the previous summer — played it again. The whole stadium sang. The Lionesses, on the pitch, holding the trophy, started dancing and singing along.
And Chloe Kelly was in the middle of giving an interview to BBC sports editor Dan Roan when she heard the song start. She paused. She listened. She turned her head. And then she did the most beautifully un-coached thing anyone has done in modern sports media. She said “thank you,” dropped the microphone, and ran across the pitch to join her teammates and sing.
She came back a minute later, picked the microphone back up, and finished the interview. “This is amazing. I just want to celebrate now.”
Sweet Caroline re-entered the UK singles chart at number twenty that week. Neil Diamond — who had retired from performing in 2018 due to Parkinson’s disease — recorded a thank-you video for the Lionesses. The song that had launched his career fifty-three years earlier had become, in a single moment, the soundtrack of the most important breakthrough in English women’s football history.
And here is what I think matters most about that moment. The 2022 Euros final was watched, in the UK alone, by 17.4 million people. It was the most-watched television broadcast in the UK that year. By comparison, the average attendance at England’s top women’s league — the Women’s Super League — had been around three thousand fans per game in the 2018-19 season. Within two years of Chloe Kelly’s goal, that number more than doubled. Marquee fixtures started drawing forty thousand fans. The WSL had grown attendance by 729 percent in the five years between 2017 and 2022.
Music doesn’t cause cultural shifts. But music marks them. And the moment Chloe Kelly ran off that BBC interview to sing Sweet Caroline was the moment everyone in England agreed: this thing is real now. This is part of our country. This is part of who we are.
[Beat.]
Meanwhile, 10,000 miles away, the same thing was happening in Australia.
HOOK (Late Act 2 — Clip-Ready)
In 2001, a 13-year-old Australian girl named Nikki Webster — who had performed in front of the entire world the year before at the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics — released a pop song called “Strawberry Kisses.” It hit number two on the Australian charts. It got a platinum certification. And then it disappeared into the dustbin of early-2000s pop nostalgia. Twenty-two years later, during the 2023 Women’s World Cup hosted in Australia, the entire Matildas national team — led by their captain, Sam Kerr — walked into their locker room every single day with that song playing on the speakers. The defender Steph Catley, who used to listen to it on a CD Walkman as a child, was the one who put it on. The team flew with it on the plane. They warmed up to it. They danced to it. And after their tournament was over — having finished fourth on home soil, the best Matildas result in history — they were on stage at a fan reception in Brisbane when Nikki Webster herself walked out and surprised them by performing the song live. Sam Kerr grabbed the microphone. The whole team sang. A 2001 Australian children’s pop song had become the soundtrack of a national sports awakening.
The Matildas had qualified for the 2023 Women’s World Cup as co-hosts — alongside New Zealand. The tournament was expected to be a big moment for Australian women’s sport. Nobody quite predicted how big.
The defender Steph Catley, who had grown up obsessed with the song, started playing “Strawberry Kisses” in the locker room before training. The goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold told reporters: “Strawberry Kisses by Nikki Webster has been a team favourite the last couple weeks. I think it’s Steph Catley’s favourite song and now we’ve all jumped on the wagon. We put it on the plane and everything.” It became the team’s good-luck charm. The team’s shared joke. The team’s pre-match ritual.
And the Matildas’ run was extraordinary. They beat Denmark in the round of sixteen. They beat France in a penalty shootout that the entire country watched. They reached the semifinal of a World Cup for the first time ever. They drew the largest single TV audience in Australian history — over eleven million viewers — for their semifinal against England.
When they lost the semifinal to England, the country didn’t treat it as defeat. They treated it as arrival. The Matildas had a fan reception in Brisbane. Tens of thousands of people showed up. And Nikki Webster, the now-grown-up child performer whose 2001 pop song had become the team’s anthem, surprised them onstage. Sam Kerr grabbed the microphone. The whole team danced. The country watched.
And the Matildas had a second song too. A more familiar one, by then. Their fans had spent the tournament chanting “Sam Kerr’s on Fire” — a direct adaptation, as we covered in Part 2, of “Will Grigg’s on Fire,” which was itself an adaptation of Gala’s 1996 Italian dance hit “Freed From Desire.” A continuous chain of cover songs, traveling from Italy to Wigan to Australia, finally arriving in the form of an Australian women’s soccer chant. The same melody Mats Hummels had joked about in 2016 was now being sung in Sydney by tens of thousands of fans about an Australian women’s soccer captain.
Sam Kerr, in honor of the chant, had become — maybe — the only women’s footballer to have a globally recognizable stadium anthem. A song that traveled three continents and three decades just to be sung about her.
[Beat. Music dips.]
And in this same era — the same Sweet Caroline era, the same Strawberry Kisses era, the same era of unauthorized songs being sung for women’s teams — the other defining sound of women’s football was happening. The sound of resistance.
For three years — between October 2021 and August 2023 — women’s football would produce some of the most powerful protest moments in modern sports history. The most famous wasn’t a song at all. It was a moment of total silence. And it would happen at exactly the sixth minute of every National Women’s Soccer League match on October 6, 2021.
[Cliffhanger sting. Ad break or transition.]
Act 3 — The Songs of Resistance: The Sixth Minute, Se Acabó, and the New Era (2021–2026)
HOOK (Act 3 Open — Clip-Ready)
On October 3, 2021, the sports website The Athletic published an investigation into a National Women’s Soccer League coach named Paul Riley. Two former players, Sinead Farrelly and Mana Shim, alleged that he had sexually coerced and harassed them dating back to 2011. They had reported him to the league six years earlier. He had been quietly moved from team to team. He had been allowed to continue coaching. He was fired the day the article was published. The NWSL paused its season. Players from around the league issued a joint statement. And three days later, when the league returned to action, the players did something that has never been done before in American team sports. Every team. Every match. Every player. At the sixth minute of each game — in honor of the six years it had taken for those players to be heard — they walked to the center circle, linked arms, and stood in silence. For sixty seconds. While the fans in the stadium stood with them. And the entire country watched. That sixty-second silence is, in my opinion, the most important single moment in the cultural history of women’s football. Because for the first time, what had been hidden for decades — the abuse, the silencing, the cost of being a woman in professional soccer — was made visible. And the women refused to be silent about it again.
Here is what makes the NWSL sixth-minute protest extraordinary.
In American team sports, players rarely — if ever — stop play in unison to make a political statement during a regular-season match. It happens at Olympic medal ceremonies. It happens at college football pregame protests. It does not happen during the actual game. It does not happen across every game in a league on the same night.
But on October 6, 2021, in three NWSL matches — Gotham FC versus the Washington Spirit at Subaru Park in Pennsylvania, the North Carolina Courage versus Racing Louisville in Cary, and the Houston Dash versus the Portland Thorns in Portland — every player on every team and every referee on every field walked to the center circle at the sixth minute, linked arms, and stood in silent solidarity for sixty seconds.
The NWSL Players Association had issued a statement: “Teams will stop play in each of tonight’s games at the sixth minute. Players will join together in solidarity at the center circle for one minute in recognition of the six years it took for Mana, Sinead, and all those who fought for too long to be heard.”
The statement asked fans to stand silently with the players. To “stand in that pain and discomfort with us, as we consider what we have been asked to sit with for too long.” Nine thousand five hundred and thirty-two fans were at Subaru Park that night. They didn’t just stand silent. They gave the players a standing ovation. The players in Portland did the same thing. The fans held up signs. The crowd in Cary, North Carolina, did the same.
And here is what I want you to understand about that moment. The NWSL was — at the time — the only professional women’s soccer league in the United States. It had taken three previous attempts to build a sustainable women’s pro soccer league in America. The WUSA had folded in 2003. The WPS had folded in 2012. The NWSL, founded in 2013, was the third try. It was, statistically, the most successful try. It had grown attendance. It had grown sponsorship. It had survived a global pandemic.
And the players were stopping their own season to insist that none of that mattered if their colleagues were being abused.
One year later, in October 2022, the Sally Yates report was released. Yates — the former Acting U.S. Attorney General — had been hired by U.S. Soccer to investigate. Her report, three hundred and nineteen pages long, concluded that abuse in the NWSL was “systemic.” It documented allegations of sexual and emotional abuse by multiple coaches, in multiple teams, across multiple years. It found that U.S. Soccer had failed to act on warnings. It found that “abusive coaches were moved from team to team.” It found that the league and the federation had “prioritized concerns of legal exposure to litigation by coaches, or the risk of drawing negative attention, over player safety.”
The report changed the NWSL forever. Coaches were fired. Owners sold teams. The league’s commissioner had resigned the previous year. A new commissioner, Jessica Berman, took over with a mandate to rebuild the league’s culture from the ground up. The next year, the NWSL signed the largest media rights deal in women’s sports history — $240 million over four years. The league’s attendance grew. New teams expanded into Bay FC, Boston Legacy, and Denver. The protest, in retrospect, did not destroy the NWSL. It made it possible.
That sixty-second silence at the sixth minute did more for women’s football — in its own quiet way — than almost any anthem ever has.
[Beat. Music shifts.]
And the silence wasn’t only American. Less than two years later, on the other side of the world, the women’s game would explode again. This time in Spain.
HOOK (Mid-Act 3 — Clip-Ready)
On August 20, 2023, in Sydney, Australia, the Spanish women’s national team beat England 1-0 to win their first FIFA Women’s World Cup. Olga Carmona scored the only goal. Spain became the first European nation to win a women’s World Cup in twenty years. And then, in the medal ceremony, the president of the Spanish Football Federation — a man named Luis Rubiales — grabbed the player Jenni Hermoso by the back of the head and forcibly kissed her on the lips. On live television. In front of the entire world. Within twenty-four hours, the two-time Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas posted two words on social media: “Se acabó.” It’s over. Within a week, every female player on the World Cup-winning Spanish team refused to play for their country until Rubiales was removed. Within a month, eighty-one Spanish players had joined the boycott. Within a year, Rubiales had been convicted of sexual assault by a Spanish court. The Spanish women’s team had won their first World Cup. And it had taken them less than a month to use the moral authority of that victory to dismantle the entire institutional sexism that had been weighing on them for decades.
“Se acabó.” It’s over.
It is, depending on how you count, the single most consequential two-word slogan in the history of modern Spanish feminism. Alexia Putellas — the captain of the Spanish team, two-time winner of the Ballon d’Or Féminin, the best women’s footballer in the world — typed those two words on her social media account in the hours after the World Cup final, in response to the Rubiales kiss. Within twenty-four hours, “Se acabó” was trending globally. Spanish women joined the chant in protests across Madrid and Barcelona. The hashtag #SeAcabó was being used by feminist groups, by politicians, by celebrities. The movement was being compared to Spain’s version of #MeToo.
Rubiales refused to resign. He gave a speech to the Spanish federation in which he repeated five times that he would not step down, while accusing his critics of “false feminism.” The federation members in the room gave him a standing ovation.
So eighty-one Spanish players, including the entire World Cup-winning team, refused to play for Spain. They wore black wristbands. They held up “Se Acabó” banners at international matches. At a UEFA Nations League match against Sweden in September 2023 — the Spanish team’s first match back — the Swedish players joined them. They held up a joint banner. Both teams raised fists in solidarity before kickoff.
Rubiales was suspended by FIFA. He was investigated by Spanish prosecutors. In February 2025 — about a year and a half after the kiss — a Spanish court convicted him of sexual assault, fined him 10,800 euros, and barred him from coming within two hundred meters of Jenni Hermoso for one year. The Spanish coach who had been with Rubiales during the controversy, Jorge Vilda, was fired.
And the song that played in the Spanish locker room when they finally celebrated the World Cup, before all of that happened — the song that the Spanish players had blasted in their dressing room before the final, the song that you can see in the locker room footage from that night, with confetti and beer and screaming — was “Breaking Free.” From Disney’s High School Musical. Released in 2006. Sung by Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens.
That’s right. The first-ever Women’s World Cup victory by a European nation in two decades was scored to a Disney Channel movie song. Because that’s what the Spanish players had grown up with. That’s what they wanted to hear. That’s the soundtrack they brought to their own party. Not “La Macarena.” Not Rosalía. Not Aitana. Not Bad Bunny. A 2006 Disney song from a kids’ movie that the players had all watched growing up.
There is something perfect about that. The women won. They sang Breaking Free. They sang it for themselves. The world wasn’t watching the locker room. They weren’t performing for anybody. They were celebrating the way teenagers celebrate. And then they walked out of the locker room into the medal ceremony, and they were violated. And the songs that came next were Spanish songs of protest — “Se acabó” — sung not by them, but by their entire country, in solidarity.
[Beat.]
But there is one more wrinkle in the Spain story. And it cuts to the heart of what this trilogy has been about.
Aitana Bonmatí — the Spanish midfielder who won the Ballon d’Or Féminin in 2023 and 2024 — gave an interview in 2024 in which she made an observation that I think is one of the most important critiques in modern women’s football.
She said, essentially: we won the World Cup. England didn’t. England won the Euros, but they didn’t win the World Cup. And yet — the cultural impact of England’s women’s football victory is bigger than ours. The Lionesses changed England forever. We won the world’s biggest trophy, and Spain feels the same. The infrastructure didn’t change. The funding didn’t change. The respect didn’t change. We did the work. The country didn’t respond.
That’s a haunting observation. And it tells you something specific about the difference music makes.
England had Sweet Caroline. England had Wembley. England had a moment — Chloe Kelly dropping the microphone — that the whole country saw and remembered and used to anchor a cultural shift. Spain won a bigger trophy. But what Spain had was Rubiales. And “Se acabó.” And the brutal, unglamorous, exhausting work of protest — not the joy of celebration.
Music doesn’t cause cultural shifts. But cultural shifts need music to stick.
And in Spain, the song wasn’t a celebration. The song was an interruption. “Se acabó.” It’s over. Stop. We will not move on.
[Music shifts. Reflective.]
And in the middle of all of that — the equal pay chants in 2019, the sixth-minute protest in 2021, the Lionesses’ Sweet Caroline in 2022, the Matildas’ Strawberry Kisses in 2023, the Rubiales scandal in 2023 — something quietly happened that, in any other context, would have been the headline of the entire trilogy.
On June 28, 2023, twenty-one days before the kickoff of the Women’s World Cup, FIFA released the very first official song in the history of the tournament.
It was called “Do It Again.” It was by New Zealand singer-songwriter BENEE — stylized in all caps — and Australian rapper Mallrat. Both from the host countries. BENEE was 23 years old. Mallrat was 24. The song was soft electro-pop. Pleasant. Modern. Not the brass-and-percussion thrill of “La Copa de la Vida” or the cross-continental ambition of “Waka Waka.” A smaller song. A different kind of song.
BENEE said in an interview: “Being a small part of this incredible celebration of women’s sport is an absolute dream come true for me. As a keen young football player, I just couldn’t have imagined this.”
She and Mallrat performed it at the opening ceremony at Eden Park in Auckland, after Maori and First Nations dancers had taken to the pitch. The song peaked at number thirty on the New Zealand Hot Singles chart. It was not a global hit. It was not Waka Waka. It was a small, modern, sweet little song that, technically, was a first.
Sixty-one years after the first official men’s World Cup song.
And the 2023 Women’s World Cup itself — the tournament around the song — broke every record women’s sport had ever set. Two billion viewers globally. Nearly two million spectators in stadiums across Australia and New Zealand. The most-watched standalone women’s sports event in human history. The final — Spain versus England — drew seventy-five million global viewers. China alone watched 53.9 million viewers for the group-stage match between China and England. The tournament contributed almost $1.9 billion to global GDP and created over 38,000 jobs, according to a joint FIFA-WTO study.
“Do It Again” was a small song that arrived at the biggest tournament women’s soccer had ever held. It arrived sixty-one years late. It arrived after the women had already built their own soundtrack — chant by chant, locker room by locker room, dressing room by dressing room. It arrived as a marker, not a creator. A celebration, not a foundation.
The foundation was already there.
[Music swells.]
And now we sit, in 2026, in a women’s football world that bears almost no resemblance to the one that existed even five years ago. The Women’s Super League in England has grown attendance by 729 percent in five years. The NWSL signed a record media rights deal in 2024. The 2027 Women’s World Cup, to be hosted by Brazil — the first South American host of the women’s tournament in history — is being planned with budgets and sponsorships that match almost any men’s World Cup of fifteen years ago. Marta, the queen, has retired from international play. The next generation — Linda Caicedo, Caitlin Foord, Lauren James, Salma Paralluelo, Aitana Bonmatí — is the most-watched generation of women’s footballers in history.
And the question for the future of women’s football music is, finally, the same question as the question for the men’s game.
When the next great women’s football song happens — the next Sweet Caroline, the next Strawberry Kisses, the next “Equal Pay!” — will the music industry know what to do with it? Or will the women, as always, build it themselves?
[Transition to outro.]
Outro
[Music settles. Reflective. Cinematic.]
So here’s what we covered today.
We started in 1972, with thirty-seven words of American education law that nobody at the time thought would affect women’s sports as much as it ended up doing. We watched seven hundred American high school girls playing soccer in 1971 grow, in fifty years, into four hundred thousand. We watched Brandi Chastain rip off her shirt at the Rose Bowl in 1999, while a 30-year-old Jennifer Lopez performed “Let’s Get Loud” in the same stadium on the same day, both of them launching careers and cultural movements that would echo for the next quarter-century. We watched the U.S. women’s national team chant their way to a $24 million equal-pay settlement. We watched Chloe Kelly drop a BBC microphone to sing Sweet Caroline at Wembley. We watched Sam Kerr and the Matildas dance to a 2001 children’s pop song that became the unofficial anthem of an entire Australian summer. We watched the NWSL stop play at the sixth minute, every match, on the same night, to honor the six years their players had been waiting to be heard. We watched the Spanish women win their first World Cup, and then watched their captain post two words — “Se acabó” — that brought down the entire institutional sexism of Spanish football in under a year.
And finally, we watched the first official song of the FIFA Women’s World Cup arrive, in 2023, sixty-one years after the men’s first one. A soft, modern, sweet little song called “Do It Again,” sung by two young women from New Zealand and Australia, who had grown up in the era that all of this protest and joy and music had made possible.
Here’s what I think the music history of women’s football actually teaches us.
Women’s football was denied, for half a century, the official soundtrack of the sport. The Latin Explosion came from the men’s World Cup. Pavarotti’s career re-launch came from the men’s World Cup. Shakira’s biggest hit came from the men’s World Cup. The biggest moments in modern pop music — La Copa de la Vida, Waka Waka, Three Lions — all came from the men’s tournament. The women’s tournament was, for sixty-one years, a culturally silent event in the world of pop music. FIFA did not commission a song. The labels didn’t see the opportunity. The artists weren’t booked.
But the women didn’t wait. The women built it anyway.
They built it with Title IX. They built it with the Rose Bowl. They built it with Brandi Chastain’s sports bra and Jennifer Lopez’s go-go boots. They built it with the chant of “Equal Pay!” and the chant of “I believe that we will win.” They built it with Sweet Caroline and Strawberry Kisses and “Sam Kerr’s on Fire.” They built it with the sixth-minute protest and with “Se acabó” and with Breaking Free playing in a locker room in Sydney. They built it with Marta, looking down the camera in 2019 and saying: women’s football depends on you to survive. Cry in the beginning so you can smile in the end.
And when the music industry finally arrived — in 2023, with one quiet song from New Zealand and Australia — the women didn’t need it. They had already done the work. The Lionesses’ Euros final drew 17.4 million UK viewers without any official FIFA song. The Matildas drew 11 million Australian viewers without any official FIFA song. The USWNT settled for $24 million without any official FIFA song. The women had built their soundtrack the same way they had built everything else in their sport for fifty years. The hard way. The right way. Their way.
The men’s World Cup is, and has always been, a music industry event. The women’s World Cup, for half a century, has been something else entirely. It has been a cover-song tradition built in the cracks. A protest movement built in the chants. A cultural revolution built in the spaces nobody else was willing to fill.
And that is the deepest reason this whole trilogy has been about cover songs. Because every great cover song is, in the end, the same act. It is somebody refusing to wait for the world to make the song they need. Somebody taking what is already there and saying: this is mine now. This is for me. This is for the people who could not get the official version.
Women’s football has been doing that for fifty years. And it is, quietly, the most important cover-song tradition in modern sport.
[Music up.]
This has been Uncovering the Cover, “The Sound of Women’s Football: How Music Shaped — and Was Shaped By — the Sport’s Greatest Cultural Revolution.” If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend who also enjoys music culture, because our culture is best preserved when music is shared. Subscribe, follow us and review us, so we can reach more music culture fans. Follow us on Instagram and TikTok, and let us know which song you’d like uncovered next. You can go to our website, which is linked in the show notes to find a transcript and all the information regarding this episode. Uncovering the Cover brings you the hidden stories behind music’s greatest transformations. Until next time!