The songs Football Fans sing tell us a lot about culture, society and belonging. Their chants have completely changed the way soccer fans around the world think about their favorite pop songs. They take a song, a lyric, a chorus, or simply the melody, and transform it into iconic anthems that transcend cultures and stay with fans for decades, sometimes centuries.
This is the second 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.
This is the story about how football fans stole the world’s best pop songs, and made them their own.
If the official World Cup songs covered in Part 1 of this series were top-down, this episode is bottom-up. This is the story of football fans — the hinchadas of South America and the terraces of the UK — who built the most important pop-music tradition almost nobody talks about: the cover song that nobody released. The chant.
Uncovering the Cover host Diego Pinzón traces the hidden lives of some of football’s greatest anthems. A 1918 Broadway show tune that became West Ham’s 100-year-old anthem. A 1945 Rodgers & Hammerstein song — written about a widow grieving her dead husband — that became the soundtrack of Liverpool Football Club. A 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival single called “Bad Moon Rising” that became Argentina’s defining chant at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil — and, on the other side of the world, Manchester United’s “Stretford End Arising.” A 1985 Italian disco track that traveled across five countries before becoming Liverpool’s “Allez Allez Allez.” A 1996 dance song by an Italian singer named Gala that, in 2016, became the most viral football chant of the modern internet era.
This is a story about borrowed melodies, working-class memory, hinchadas in Buenos Aires and torcidas in South America, and terraces in England. It is the story of how fans became the most important cover artists in modern pop music, and how the songs they stole built the global culture of football itself.
📱 Follow Uncovering the Cover:
Instagram: [@uncoveringthecover]
TikTok: [@pinzondiego]
Website: [pinzondiego.com/podcast]
CREDITS:
Host, Producer, Editor: Diego Pinzón
SUPPORT THE SHOW:
If you enjoyed this episode: ✅ Subscribe to the show ✅ Leave a 5-star review ✅ Share with a friend ✅ Follow us on social media
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any artist, label, or organization mentioned. All music samples are used for educational and commentary purposes under fair use doctrine.
Social-First Cold Open
[Open cold. Distant stadium drums. A single voice starts a chant.]
In June 2014, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, fifty thousand Argentinians crammed into the famous Maracana stadium to watch their national team play in their opening match of the FIFA World Cup.
And they all started singing the same song.
“Brasil, decime qué se siente…”
[SONG]
Brazil, tell me how it feels.
To have your daddy in your house.
I swear, even if the years go by, we’ll never forget…
It was the most-sung football chant of the 2014 FIFA Men’s World Cup.
It was sung by every Argentinian fan, in every stadium, in every street in Brazil. It was sung in the locker room by Lionel Messi and his teammates.
And it was set, note for note, to the melody of “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. A 1969 American rock song. About the apocalypse.
[BAD MOON RISING]
Perhaps, a premonition of what was about to happen to the Brazilian National team at the tournament.
Nobody in Argentina knew where the melody came from. Nobody in Manchester knew either — even though, at exactly the same moment, Manchester United fans were singing the same melody as their own chant. “Stretford End Arising.”
[STRETFORS END ARISING]
Half a world apart. Same song. Different meaning.
This is the story of the greatest cover songs in modern music that almost nobody calls cover songs.
The chants of the football terraces.
[Beat.]
How a 1945 Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway song — about a widow grieving her dead husband — that became Liverpool Football Club’s anthem.
How a 1918 Broadway show tune sung to a five-year-old boy in a soap advertisement that became West Ham United’s anthem for over 100 years.
How a 1985 Italian disco song about the end of summer that traveled across five countries before becoming the loudest song in the Champions League.
How a 1996 dance hit by a singer named Gala that, in 2016, became the biggest viral chant of the modern internet — sung at Euro 2016 in honor of a striker who never played a single minute of the tournament.
[Music shifts. Cold open closing.]
Pop musicians release their songs. They expect them to be heard.
They do not expect them to be stolen by thousands of fans in a stadium 6,000 miles away and turned into something completely different.
But that is exactly what happens.
Every weekend. In every country. Right now.
And it might be the most important cover-song tradition in modern pop music.
[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 second episode of our three-part series on how soccer has become part of pop culture thanks to music… Last episode was about the history behind the songs of the FIFA Men’s World Cup, and our next episode will be about the impact of music in helping the growth of the women’s game. This episode brings us the story of football fan chants — a story about how the hinchadas of Latin America and the terraces of the UK quietly built one of the largest, strangest, and most enduring cover-song traditions in the world… by stealing the best pop songs ever written, and turning them into something the original artists could never have imagined.
Act 1 — Two Cities, One Idea: How the Terraces Invented Cover Culture (1900–1970)
HOOK (Act 1 Open — Clip-Ready)
In 1918, in a Broadway musical called The Passing Show, an American actress named Helen Carrington walked out onto a stage in New York and sang a brand-new waltz called “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” It was about a five-year-old boy in a Pears Soap advertisement. It had nothing to do with football. Nothing to do with England. Nothing to do with anything more dangerous than children blowing bubbles in the air. Today, that song is the official anthem of West Ham United, one of England’s most beloved football clubs. It has been their anthem for almost 100 years. Twenty-four thousand of their fans once stood in their stadium and blew real, physical soap bubbles into the air for one full minute, setting a world record. They were celebrating a song that originated as a Broadway show tune about a five-year-old in an 1880s soap advertisement. And that is one of the more normal stories you’re about to hear.
[BLOWING BUBBLES ORIGINAL]
There is a question that musicologists almost never ask… but should.
Why do football fans sing? Where, exactly, did this tradition come from? Why do supporters of a sports team — and only a sports team, really; you don’t see this at tennis, or golf, or track and field — collectively gather in a stadium and sing complex, multi-verse pop songs in unison, often for ninety minutes straight, often badly, often beautifully, almost always with someone else’s melody underneath?
The honest answer is that nobody completely knows. But the best historical explanation goes something like this: in the early 20th century, football was almost entirely a working-class sport in two specific places — the industrial cities of England, and the port neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro. In both places, by total coincidence, the local working class had a very specific cultural inheritance: music halls. London music halls. Argentine tango bars. Brazilian samba clubs. Places where regular people gathered, drank, and sang. Singing wasn’t a performance. It was a social ritual.
When those same people went to a football match — and football matches in the 1920s were big, crowded, working-class events — they brought the only thing they had with them. They brought their songs.
[BLOWING BUBBLES]
Which brings us to West Ham. And bubbles.
In 1918, a Broadway musical called The Passing Show opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York. Among its songs was a brand-new waltz called “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” written by John Kellette under a pseudonym, because three different lyricists were under three different publishing contracts and couldn’t legally credit themselves. The song became a Tin Pan Alley hit, Tin Pan Alley meaning the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated American popular music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ben Selvin’s Novelty Orchestra recorded it. It crossed the Atlantic to British music halls in the early 1920s.
And then it walked into a school in East London.
[BLOWING BUBBLES]
There was a school in the neighborhood of West Ham called Park School. The headmaster, a man named Cornelius Beal, was a football fan and friends with Charlie Paynter, who would later manage West Ham United. There was a kid at Park School named William Murray — a teenage footballer with curly hair, who looked, vaguely, like the boy in a famous painting by John Everett Millais called Bubbles — a painting that, by then, had been printed on millions of Pears Soap advertisements across Britain. The kids at school called William Murray “Bubbles.” When his team played well, the headmaster Cornelius Beal would sing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” to celebrate.
Murray never made the West Ham first team. He had an “early promise that was not fulfilled,” as one historian puts it. But because Beal was friends with Paynter, and because some of Murray’s school teammates did make it to West Ham, the song followed them. By the 1940s, it was being sung at every West Ham home match. By the 1970s, it had a punk-rock cover by the Cockney Rejects. By the 1990s, real soap bubble machines were installed at the Boleyn Ground, West Ham’s previous stadium. By 2026, it had been the club’s anthem for so long that the song itself — a 1918 Broadway show tune about a Victorian-era soap advertisement — had completely lost its original meaning and become, by force of repetition, something else entirely. Something East London. Something working class. Something that belonged to an era that didn’t exist when the song was written.
Pretty bubbles in the air. They fly so high, nearly reach the sky. Then like my dreams, they fade and die.
That is a song about death and disappointment. And it has been sung, joyfully, on football terraces for a century. Including London Stadium, the home of West Ham since 2016.
[BLOWING BUBBLES]
Now, let’s jump forward to 1945. But staying on Broadway. To a different musical. And to a song that is, quietly, the most important cover song in football history.
[YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE ORIGINAL]
You’ll Never Walk Alone was written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for their 1945 musical Carousel. The version you just heard is from the movie Carousel, based on the musical. In the show, it’s sung by a woman named Nettie Fowler to her cousin Julie, whose husband has just stabbed himself to death after a failed robbery. It is, technically, a funeral song. And in October 1963, a Liverpudlian band called Gerry & The Pacemakers — managed by Brian Epstein, the same manager who looked after The Beatles — released a cover of that funeral song. It went straight to number one in the UK. It stayed there for four weeks. It only dropped from number one when The Beatles knocked it off. And around the same time, Anfield Stadium — Liverpool Football Club’s home ground — did something almost no other stadium in England did at the time. They had a pre-match DJ. He played the top ten singles in reverse order in the hour before kickoff. Which meant that, in October 1963, the song right before every Liverpool home match was a cover of a Broadway funeral song. And the fans — being from Liverpool, being proud of their own — sang along. Sixty-three years later, they have never, ever stopped.
But as always on our podcast, there’s a lot more to the story. SO, let’s dissect it.
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” was written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for the 1945 musical Carousel — but it was adapted, in turn, from Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 Hungarian play Liliom. This was in April 1945, still five months before World War II ended, so Rodgers and Hammerstein rewrote Liliom with a more hopeful ending so American audiences could leave the theater not completely devastated.
In the show, the song is sung by Nettie Fowler — cousin of the protagonist, Julie Jordan — to comfort Julie after her husband Billy Bigelow has died in her arms following a botched robbery. It is, literally, a song to a widow. The chorus tells her: when you walk through a storm, hold your head up high, and don’t be afraid of the dark. Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart. And you’ll never walk alone.
It became an instant hit. Frank Sinatra recorded a version in 1945. Elvis Presley covered it. Barbra Streisand covered it. It was, by 1963, a well-known Broadway standard.
[YOU’LL NEVER WALK SINATRA]
And then a Liverpudlian kid named Gerry Marsden, who had seen Carousel growing up and loved the song, recorded a version with his band, Gerry & The Pacemakers. They were managed by Brian Epstein — the same Brian Epstein who managed The Beatles. They were part of the same Merseybeat wave. Their cover of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” was released in October 1963, 17 years after the original play. It went to number one in the UK, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. It stayed at number one for four weeks until The Beatles knocked it off.
And in October 1963, Stuart Brennan, Anfield Stadium’s pre-match DJ — something revolutionary at the time in English stadiums — would play the top ten singles in reverse order before every home game. Which meant that every weekend, the last song before kickoff was the number-one song in the country. And in October 1963, that song was “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”
The fans on the Kop — the famous standing terrace at Anfield — sang along. Because of course they did. It was the number-one song in the country, and a Liverpool band had recorded it. It was theirs.
[YOU’LL NEVER WALK PACEMAKERS]
Then the song dropped off the charts. The DJ stopped playing it. And the fans, the story goes, started chanting “where’s our song? Where’s our song?” until Stuart Brennan put it back on. They’ve been singing it ever since. For more than Sixty years and counting.
Bill Shankly — Liverpool’s legendary manager — when Gerry Marsden played him a demo of the song, was, in Tommy Smith’s words, “in awe of what he heard.” The phrase “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is now etched onto the Shankly Gates outside Anfield. It’s on the club’s coat of arms — the only song title in English football to have that honor. It has been adopted by Celtic in Glasgow, Borussia Dortmund in Germany, Feyenoord in the Netherlands, FC Tokyo in Japan. It is sung at funerals across the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a 99-year-old British veteran named Captain Tom Moore recorded a version with Michael Ball that went to number one and raised £36 million for the National Health Service.
And every word of it is still Rodgers and Hammerstein’s. Note for note. They wrote a song to comfort a fictional widow in a 1945 Broadway musical. The widow doesn’t know — because she’s fictional — but every weekend, sixty thousand people on a terrace in Liverpool sing her funeral song back to her.
[YOU’LL NEVER WALK STADIUM]
Now … let’s move 7,000 miles south. To Buenos Aires.
At exactly the same moment that Liverpool was inventing the modern football anthem out of a Broadway musical, the hinchadas of Argentine football were doing something even more radical. They were taking the entire popular-music catalog of their country — the tangos, the rock, the cumbia, the murga — and rewriting all of it as football chants.
And they were doing it as a tradition, not as a novelty.
There is a phrase in Argentine football culture: “música de cancha.” Pitch music. Stadium music. It refers to the collective practice of taking a known popular song — usually a hit by a major Argentine band — and replacing the lyrics with chants directed at your team, at your rivals, at your city, at your history. It is, structurally, the same thing Liverpool fans did with “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” But it didn’t happen once. It happened thousands of times. With thousands of songs. By dozens of bands. Over a hundred years.
Argentina’s greatest rock bands have all been quietly absorbed into the hinchada repertoire. Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. Andrés Calamaro. Soda Stereo. La Mosca. Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota. Attaque 77. Even, sometimes, Spinetta and Charly García — the founding fathers of Argentine rock — although their music tends to be too complex melodically to make great chants. The pattern is the same: a hit song with a strong chorus enters the cultural bloodstream, and within a year or two, a hinchada somewhere has rewritten the lyrics.
And here’s where the story gets interesting. Because while England was busy building one anthem at a time, Argentine football culture had quietly invented something much bigger. It had invented a system. A cover-song factory. A tradition that turned every new pop hit into raw material for the next generation of stadium chants.
When you ask what Argentine fan culture actually is, that’s the answer. It is, structurally, the largest informal cover-song movement in the modern world. Nobody licenses these songs. Nobody pays royalties. Nobody asks for permission. The original artists usually find out years later from a friend.
The number of songs that have been covered by the hinchadas in Argentina throughout history is so large that it will probably take us weeks to go over them. We’ll talk about a few of them later in this episode, but there are dozens of playlists on Spotify and videos on YouTube compiling the best chants from stadiums. There are a few on the show notes of the episode.
The beauty of this phenomenon is that Argentinean fans get inspiration from music genres so complex and unique on their own that come from all over the world… Think about this…
tango, the most pure Argentine expression has its own chants even has songs interpreted by Maradona…
[TANGO CHANT]
Cumbia, which originated in the north coast of Colombia, and has spread across Latin America, gave us iconic chants…
[CUMBIA CHANT]
Rock en Español, which is simply the Spanish take on rock n roll, which is in itself a musical style developed by Afro communities in the United States post-World War II. But rock in Spanish emerged particularly in Cuba, Argentina, Mexico and Spain.
[Y DALE ALEGRÍA A MI CORAZÓN CHANT]
Even salsa, a type of music, that originated from the Cuban and Puerto Rican diaspora in New York City, with roots in West and Central Africa, has become fundamental for Latin American football chants…
[CELIA CRUZ CHANT]
This is a mix of cultures coming together… of how human evolution, cultural adaptation and pride become contemporary and part of our lives.
And so by the early 1990s, you have two of the great football cultures on Earth — one in England, one in Argentina — both quietly doing the same thing. Both taking pop music and turning it into religion. Both inventing the modern football anthem. But the most interesting cover stories aren’t the songs that stayed local. They’re the ones that crossed oceans. The ones that ended up, somehow, in two completely different parts of the world at the same time. And the most famous example of that — the strangest example — was about to happen.
[Cliffhanger sting. Ad break or transition.]
Act 2 — The Songs That Crossed Oceans (1985–2014)
HOOK (Act 2 Open — Clip-Ready)
In April 1969, an American rock band called Creedence Clearwater Revival released a song called “Bad Moon Rising.” It was written by John Fogerty about the apocalypse — about hurricanes, earthquakes, the end of days. It peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Then it became one of the most famous classic-rock songs of all time. And then, fifty years later, the exact same melody became — separately, independently, with neither side knowing about the other — both Argentina’s most-sung World Cup chant until then AND a Manchester United chant called “Stretford End Arising.” On opposite hemispheres of Earth, at the same matches, on the same nights, two enormous football fanbases were singing the same Creedence song with completely different lyrics. Neither of them knew. And that is what happens when a melody is good enough. It goes everywhere. It belongs to everyone. And it stops belonging to the band that wrote it.
The 2014 FIFA Men’s World Cup was held in Brazil. Brazil and Argentina are the two great football rivals of South America — a rivalry that’s been written about in entire libraries of sociology and history. So when 50,000 Argentine fans crossed the border into Brazil for that tournament, they came with a song.
The song was called “Brasil, decime qué se siente.”
[BRASIL DECIME QUÉ SE SIENTE]
This is what the son says: Brazil, tell me how it feels — to have your daddy in your house. I swear, even if the years go by, we’ll never forget. That Diego Maradona dribbled past you. That Claudio Caniggia scored on you. That you’ve been crying since 1990 World Cup. And Messi is going to come and take the cup back to Buenos Aires. And that Maradona is greater than Pelé.
[BRASIL DECIME QUÉ SE SIENTE]
Every Argentine fan sang it. The players sang it in the dressing room after they beat Belgium in the Quarterfinals. It took over Copacabana Beach. It became the defining song of the 2014 World Cup. It made Brazilian fans furious. It made global headlines. It even became, in some retellings, one of the reasons Brazil collapsed psychologically against Germany in that famous semifinal, where Brazil lost by a score of 7-1 – the biggest defeat in Brazilian football since 1920.
And the melody was “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. A rock band from El Cerrito, California formed in 1959, a year after Messi’s dad was born.
[BAD MOON RISING]
“Bad Moon Rising” was released in April 1969. Written by John Fogerty in twenty minutes one afternoon at the Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco. About the apocalypse. About hurricanes and earthquakes and the end of days. A song that has nothing to do with Brazil, nothing to do with Argentina, nothing to do with football, nothing to do with anything more than John Fogerty’s feverish vision of what the late 1960s felt like in America. Peaked at number two on the Billboard charts. And forty-five years later, fifty thousand Argentines were singing it in Portuguese-speaking Brazil to taunt their oldest rival.
Here’s the part that’s almost impossible to believe.
At the same time — the exact same years, the exact same months — Manchester United fans were singing the same melody. As a chant called “Stretford End Arising.” Named after the famous standing terrace at Old Trafford. With completely different lyrics. Completely different references. Completely different reasons.
They didn’t know about Argentina. Argentina didn’t know about them.
And it turns out the melody had also been used by Leeds United fans, who adapted it in 2018 to honor their manager Marcelo Bielsa — an Argentine, ironically. And by Liverpool fans, to celebrate the Portuguese international Diogo Jota, who tragically passed away in 2025.
[BAD MOON RISING – DIOGO JOTA]
In case that was hard to understand, they sing:
Oh, he wears the number 20,
He will take us to victory,
And when he’s running down the left wing,
He’ll cut inside and score for LFC.
He’s a lad from Portugal,
Better than Figo don’t you know,
Oh, his name is Diogo! [1, 2, 3]
One melody. Four completely separate football cultures. None of them aware of the others. But all of them united for the same love of football, music, and football chants.
That’s what happens when a song is good enough. It stops belonging to the band. It stops belonging to a country. It just becomes a melody. And melodies, it turns out, are the truly portable thing in modern culture. Words are local. Languages are local. But “duh-duh-duh, duh-duh-duh, dut-dut” — that’s universal. You can drop that into any language. Onto any rival. Into any stadium. It works.
Creedence Clearwater Revival, by the way — the band itself — has had complicated feelings about all of this. The original surviving members performed at Buenos Aires’s Luna Park in 2013 under a slight name change, Creedence Clearwater Revisited. The drummer, Doug Clifford, has spoken in interviews about how moved he was to see Argentine fans sing his band’s song back to him at every show. Argentine football, he said, gave the song a second life he never could have predicted. “It’s something marvelous,” he told La Nación..
[BAD MOON RISING]
Now let me tell you another version of this story. With a different song. From a different country. With an even stranger journey.
HOOK (Mid-Act 2 — Clip-Ready)
In 1985, an Italian disco duo called Righeira — two friends who had no idea what they were doing — released a song called “L’Estate Sta Finendo.” “The Summer Is Ending.” It was a melancholic dance track about turning twenty and watching life slip away. It hit number one in Italy and was the ninth best-selling single of the year. Thirty years later, that same song — that little melancholic Italian disco track — became the loudest song in the UEFA Champions League. Sung at full volume by sixty thousand Liverpool fans in Madrid. Sung by Napoli ultras. Sung by Atlético Madrid. Sung by FC Porto. Sung by Rangers in Glasgow. Sung by AF-Lek Talbot and Hurlford United at the Scottish Junior Cup final. It made it from a small town in Italy called L’Aquila — a town that suffered a devastating earthquake in 2009 — across five different countries before it ended up on the steps of Anfield. And nobody at Universal Music has ever made a single dollar from it.
[L’ESTATE STA FINENDO]
This is the story of “Allez Allez Allez.”
Some Liverpool fans will tell you this is their song. Some will tell you they invented it. Both of those things are wrong. The truth is much more interesting.
In 1985, an Italian Italo-disco duo called Righeira — real names Stefano Righi and Stefano Rota, both from Turin — released a song called “L’Estate Sta Finendo.” “The Summer Is Ending.” It was a melancholic dance track produced by Carmelo La Bionda. The lyrics were about turning twenty and watching life slip away. It won the Festivalbar in 1985 — the biggest summer music festival in Italy. It was the ninth best-selling Italian single of the year.
And then it sat on a shelf for twenty-five years.
Until the early 2010s. When something strange started happening.
In a small Italian city called L’Aquila — a city in the Abruzzo region that had suffered a devastating earthquake in 2009 — the local football team playing in the Italian fourth division started using the song to support themselves. The ultras of L’Aquila chanted it with new lyrics about pride, resilience, never giving up — appropriate for a city that had been physically destroyed. They called it “Un Giorno all’improvviso”, or “one day suddenly”
[L’ESTATE STA FINENDO – L’AQUILA]
The melody traveled to Genoa. Then to Naples. Then to Italian football powerhouse Juventus. By 2014 or so, “Un giorno all’improvviso” was being sung by every major Italian ultra group.
And then the FC Porto ultras — the Super Dragões, in Portugal — saw a YouTube clip of the Napoli chant. They liked it. They adopted it.
Then, in February 2018, Liverpool Football Club played FC Porto at the Estádio do Dragão in the Champions League round of sixteen. Liverpool won 5-0. The Liverpool travelling support — among them a musician named Jamie Webster, an electrician who played guitar at a Liverpool pre-match gig called BOSS Night — heard the Porto fans singing this strange Italian melody. And they started to copy it.
Two Liverpool fans named Phil Howard and Liam Malone had actually been working on lyrics for that exact melody since 2016, after seeing a YouTube clip of Napoli fans singing it. They’d been trying to get the song going. Webster heard the new chant taking shape in Porto, and when he got home, he wrote out the full lyrics. “We conquered all of Europe, we’re never gonna stop, from Paris on to Turkey, we’ve won the fucking lot. Bob Paisley and Bill Shankly, the Fields of Anfield Road, we are the supporters, we come from Liverpool. Allez, allez, allez.”
[L’ESTATE STA FINENDO – LIVERPOOL]
Webster recorded the full version. It got picked up at BOSS Night. By the end of the 2017-18 season, every Liverpool fan was singing it. By the time Liverpool reached the Champions League final in Kyiv, “Allez Allez Allez” had become Liverpool’s most iconic new chant in a generation.
Arsenal copied it. Celtic adopted it. Scottish Junior Cup teams adopted it. Even a group of Kilmarnock fans from Scotland wrote a version of it about an angry bus driver who wouldn’t let them drink beer on the bus.
“L’Estate Sta Finendo” — the original song — is now one of those weird artifacts of the streaming era. It still sits on Righeira’s back catalog. It sounds like exactly what it is: a 1985 Italian disco track. Pleasant. Nothing special, perhaps without all this football nostalgia attached to it. Stefano Righi, who wrote the song when he was twenty years old, has watched the second life of his composition with a mixture of pride and bemusement. “I love that what’s been taken from my song, is the melody. The anthemic sound. Football fans found something in it that I never put in there. And I think that’s beautiful,” he said in an interview to a local Italian paper.
He’s right. A song about the end of summer became a song about conquering Europe. The same notes. Completely different meaning. Just because some football fans somewhere thought the chord progression was good.
[L’ESTATE STA FINENDO]
Now, let me give you one more example of this kind of song migration. This time from the other direction — from South America outward.
HOOK (Late Act 2 — Clip-Ready)
In 1993, the bassist of an Argentine ska band called Los Fabulosos Cadillacs went to a poor neighborhood in Bahía, Brazil. He wanted to feel the rhythm of Brazilian drumming. He came home to Buenos Aires and wrote a song that combined those Bahian drums with a bassline he openly stole from “Walking on the Moon” by The Police. The song was called Matador. It was about a fictional Latin American freedom fighter being hunted by the secret police, and it name-checked the Chilean musician Víctor Jara — tortured and killed by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1973. That song went on to become one of the most successful songs in the history of Latin American rock. It also became — almost immediately — the most-adapted football chant on the entire continent. Everywhere, from clubs in Argentina, to Colombia, to Mexico, they all sing it. And the band that wrote it — Los Fabulosos Cadillacs — has never received a single peso for any of it. They love it anyway.
[MATADOR]
Los Fabulosos Cadillacs are one of the most important rock bands in Latin American history. Formed in Buenos Aires in 1984, they pioneered the genre we now call rock latino — a fusion of Latin rhythms with Anglo rock, reggae and ska, blending Caribbean and South American sound into something completely new. Their song “Matador,” released in 1993 on the album Vasos Vacíos, is widely considered one of the greatest singles in the history of rock in Spanish.
[MATADOR]
Here’s where the song came from. In 1992, Flavio Cianciarulo, or Sr. Flavio, — the bassist of the band — went on a trip to Bahía, in northern Brazil. He walked the streets of the Pelourinho neighborhood, listening to Bahian drum lines. He came back to Buenos Aires with a melody in his head and a bassline he openly admitted he stole — his word — from “Walking on the Moon” by The Police. He wrote the song in a hotel room during a tour. The lyrics were about a fictional Latin American matador — not a bullfighter, but a freedom fighter — being hunted by the secret police. It name-checks Víctor Jara, the Chilean folk singer who was tortured and murdered by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1973 just for the crime of writing political songs. It is a song about resistance, about state violence, about the long century of political repression across Latin America.
And the moment it came out — the moment it was performed on MTV Latin America’s very first Unplugged in 1994 — Argentine football fans heard the chorus, heard the propulsive bass, heard the Bahian drum line, and went: that’s our next chant.
[MATADOR – HINCHADA]
Within months, the hinchada of San Lorenzo de Almagro — late Pope Francis’s favorite team, by the way — had rewritten the lyrics: “Me dicen el matador, nací en Boedo” — they call me the matador, I was born in Boedo. That’s the version you just heard. The hinchada of Racing Club had their own version: “Tenés que salir campeón, este es el año.” You’ve got to come out a champion, this is the year.
The song traveled across South America. Independiente Santa Fe, the Bogotá-based Colombian club, adopted “Matador” through their barra brava La Guardia Albirroja Sur. Atlético Nacional in Medellín adopted it. The América de Cali fans adopted it. Eventually, it crossed into Mexico — the hinchada of Rayados de Monterrey, “La Adicción,” sings “Matador” before every match. The Mexican striker Luis Hernández, who played for Monterrey, and had a short stint for Boca Juniors in Argentina, was nicknamed “El Matador”, and the song has become synonymous of his career. Hernández is Mexico’s all-time leading goalscorer in the World Cup, along Javier Hernández.
Now, think about the journey of this song. A bassline from an Anglo-British band — The Police — gets stolen by an Argentine rock musician who has just come back from a Brazilian neighborhood. He writes a song about a Chilean dictator and a Chilean martyr. The song becomes a hit on MTV. Then it is collectively rewritten into a chant by thousands of fans across Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and beyond. Every adaptation makes it more local. Every local version makes the original less recognizable.
And here’s the part that I think is most important. Flavio Cianciarulo, the bassist who wrote the original song, has been asked about this a thousand times. His answer is always some version of: I never wrote it for that. I wrote it about Víctor Jara. About my own anger about what dictatorships had done to my continent. And every time I hear sixty thousand fans in a stadium singing it about a striker or a manager or a stadium they love, I think: that’s what music is supposed to do. It’s supposed to outgrow you.
[MATADOR]
In 2006, MTV Latin America produced a ranking of the best 100 music videos of all time, during the network’s 25th anniversary, and the video for “Matador” was number two, only surpassed by Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.
Coming up after the break, in the 21st century, something new happened. The fan chant — which had always been a slow, organic, local phenomenon — became something else. It became a viral meme. And the prototype for that, the song that proved a single fan in his bedroom could rewrite a melody for the entire continent in two weeks, was about a Northern Irish striker who never played a minute of football at Euro 2016.
[Cliffhanger sting. Ad break or transition.]
Act 3 — The Viral Era: When Fans Became the Cover Artists (2003–Today)
HOOK (Act 3 Open — Clip-Ready)
In May 2016, Sean Kennedy, a fan of English third division club Wigan Athletic sat down in front of his laptop in a small house in the north of England and recorded a thirty-second clip. He took a 1996 Italian dance song called “Freed From Desire” and he rewrote the lyrics. About a striker his lower-league club had just bought. A guy nobody outside Wigan had ever heard of. The new lyrics were: “Will Grigg’s on fire, your defence is terrified.” Sean Kennedy uploaded the clip to YouTube. Within three weeks, every single Wigan fan was singing it. Within six weeks, every single Northern Ireland fan was singing it. Within eight weeks, it was the most famous song at Euro 2016 — sung by Welsh fans, Polish fans, Irish fans, French fans. By the time Northern Ireland was knocked out of the tournament in the round of sixteen, the German team’s World Cup-winning defender Mats Hummels was telling reporters, jokingly, that yes, the German team had taken note of Will Grigg, and he’d like to swap shirts. Will Grigg did not play a single minute of Euro 2016. Not one. He sat on the bench the entire tournament. He may be the only player in football history to become globally famous for not playing.
The Will Grigg story is, I think, the perfect modern fan-chant story. Because it tells you exactly how the internet changed an old, slow, organic tradition into something brand new.
Here’s the timeline. In 1996, an Italian singer named Gala Rizzatto released a dance song called “Freed From Desire.” Her lyrics — and this is fascinating, given everything that happens later — were inspired by a Buddhist prayer: “freed from desire, mind and senses are purified.” It’s actually a song about spiritual transcendence, dressed up in 1990s Eurodance production. The song hit number two in the UK in July 1997. Eight weeks in the UK top ten, competing directly against the prime of Britpop. It was, statistically, one of the biggest dance songs of the entire decade.
In May 2016, Wigan Athletic — a small club in the north of England — had just been promoted out of League One, the third division of English football. A big part of that promotion was a striker named Will Grigg, who had scored 25 goals during the campaign. A Wigan fan named Sean Kennedy decided to write a song to celebrate him. He took the “Freed From Desire” chorus — “Freed from desire, mind and senses purified” — and replaced it with: “Will Grigg’s on fire, your defence is terrified.”
That’s it. That’s the whole change. Eleven syllables for eleven syllables. He recorded a clip. He uploaded it to YouTube.
[WILL GRIGG’S ON FIRE]
Within three weeks, it had gone viral. Within a month, Wigan players had recorded their own version. Northern Ireland — Grigg’s national team — was about to play in Euro 2016. The chant traveled with the fans. By the time the tournament started, every single Northern Irish supporter in France was singing it.
Then it spread. France fans started singing “Grizi’s on fire” for Antoine Griezmann. England fans started singing “Vardy’s on fire” for Jamie Vardy. Welsh fans, Polish fans, Irish fans. By the end of the tournament, Will Grigg had become one of the most famous footballers in Europe — a player who had not, at any point, kicked a ball in Euro 2016. He sat on the bench for every game. He didn’t make a single substitute appearance. He was the most over-celebrated bench player in the history of international football.
The song took over all of Europe, it became a cultural phenomenon to the point that players from other teams started to take notice. Before the final group C match between Northern Ireland and Germany, German defender Mats Hummels was asked in a press conference whether the Germans were “terrified” of Will Grigg.
[HUMMELS ON GRIGG]
His answer was perfect, after laughing about it, he said in German: “It would be nice if that were true. But it’s not. I am already a fan of him and his story. I will try to get his shirt.” He understood the joke. He played along. He was, in 2016, a World Cup champion telling a press conference of international media that he wanted the shirt of a player on the opposing bench because of a meme song.
And here’s the part of the story that matters most. The original Italian singer, Gala — who is, by the way, still actively recording — got contacted about the song. She did interviews. She said something genuinely beautiful. She told a British student newspaper at Durham University: “What I love is that these fans have caught up on the desire in the song and they used the anthemic element to breathe life into their players. To encourage them. It is so beautiful and fitting that they found my song.”
That’s a working musician — an Italian dance artist whose song had not been culturally relevant in twenty years — discovering that her music was being sung by hundreds of thousands of football fans across Europe. In 2023, “Freed from Desire” was chosen by three national teams for the FIFA Women’s World Cup, as their goal song. Before the tournament, which was played in Australia and New Zealand, each national team submitted to FIFA up to two songs to be played over the stadium PA system whenever they scored. France, co-hosts New Zealand, and Switzerland chose Gala’s song, which brought her a new found fame. Here she is talking about it on GB News:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_HVgQL3JwE]
FIFA even selected the song as the official audio identity for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup. “Freed From Desire” was on every marketing and promotional campaign, it was played in every stadium across the United States, and during every broadcast.
This is what the modern internet does to cover-song culture. It compresses the timeline. What used to take decades — like “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” which took six years to travel from Broadway to the Kop — now takes weeks. The melody finds the new lyric. The new lyric finds the audience. The audience finds the original artist. And the original artist — almost always — says some version of: yes, of course, take it. This is what songs are for.
[FREED FROM DESIRE]
And the modern era has produced more of these stories than we have time for in one episode.
There’s “Hey Jude” — The Beatles’ 1968 song, written by Paul McCartney for John Lennon’s son Julian — that became Manchester City’s anthem in the late 1960s, partly because 1968 happened to be the last year City won the league for forty-four years. The chorus — “naa, na, na, naa-na-na-na” — became infinitely adaptable. Brentford fans sing it. Leicester City fans sang it during their miraculous 2015-16 title run. Arsenal fans sing it about Olivier Giroud. The fact that “Hey Jude” was written by a Liverpudlian — a city Manchester famously hates — has somehow not stopped this.
There’s “Sweet Caroline” — Neil Diamond’s 1969 song, written about a young Caroline Kennedy, daughter of former president John F. Kennedy — that, during Euro 2020 and Euro 2024, became England’s adopted fan anthem. We’ll come back to that one in Part 3 of this trilogy, because the Sweet Caroline story belongs more to women’s football than to men’s.
There’s also “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis — written by Noel Gallagher about, basically, his own arguments with his brother Liam — that became, after the 2017 Manchester Arena attack, a song of national mourning. Sung at every England match for years after. The song never references Manchester or terrorism or grief. The grief is in the singers.
There’s “Can’t Help Falling in Love” — made famous by Elvis Presley — which Hull City fans turned into the song to kick off each one of their home matches, with the help of their stadium PA.
[HULL CITY]
And in South America, the cover-song factory has never stopped producing.
In Argentina, Andrés Calamaro — the famous singer of Los Rodríguez and one of the great rock-en-español songwriters — has had multiple songs absorbed into hinchada culture. His track “La Parte de Adelante” became a chant for the Argentine national team during the 2018 World Cup. His song “Para No Olvidar” became a beloved chant for Racing Club. Attaque 77’s punk cover of Roberto Carlos’s ballad “AMIGO” became the chant “Se Viene La Banda de Merlo” from fans of third division side Deportivo Merlo, and was eventually voted the best fan chant in Argentine football history. What they’re chanting on the following clip goes something like: “Gentleman, I’m a fan of Merlo. I carry it in my soul, the band that’s with you all the time, Because Deportivo is truly a feeling”, pay attention to the rhythm.
[SE VIENE LA BANDA DE MERLO]
Think about this… Roberto Carlos, considered to be the King of Brazilian music, dedicated the song “Amigo” to his best friend and co-composer Erasmo Carlos… which became extremely popular iwhen a children’s choir sang the song during Pope John Paul II’s visit to Mexico City… then traveled to Argentina and during the pandemic, a punk band called Attaque 77 – attack 77 – made a cover version, which then turned into an emblematic fan chant for a third division team.. the journey is unreal.
[AMIGO – ROBERTO CARLOS + ATTAQUE]
In Brazil, the torcidas have built a parallel tradition more rooted in samba and pagode arrangements than direct pop covers, but the principle is the same. Fans take what their culture has already produced, and they hand it back to themselves as a chant.
Which brings us back to the song we mentioned during the first episode of this three-part-series. “Muchachos.” That schoolteacher in Argentina, Fernando Romero. The La Mosca breakup song. The 2022 World Cup. We told that story in Part 1 because it was the perfect example of the official World Cup music era cracking open and the fan-made song winning. But it deserves a second mention now, because in the context of this episode, it makes more sense than ever. “Muchachos” wasn’t an isolated miracle. It was the latest, biggest, most successful entry in a hinchada tradition that has been running for more than a hundred years.
That schoolteacher didn’t invent anything. He participated in a cover-song tradition older than himself. He just happened to write the version that broke through to the entire planet.
[MUCHACHOS]
And finally, we take a look at Colombia, where something different has just happened. Traditionally, fan groups in Colombia have imitated the Argentinian and English models… the barras of Millonarios in Bogotá sing “Una Vez Más” to the melody of Boney M’s “Rivers of Babylon” — a 1978 reggae song originally written by The Melodians in Jamaica based on a Hebrew psalm. The Independiente Santa Fe barra adapts Nino Bravo’s “Un Beso Y Una Flor.” The Atlético Nacional barra adapts Carlos Vives’s “La Tierra del Olvido” — a vallenato classic.
And listen to this story… Carlos Vives, one of the most emblematic Colombian singers and songwriters and one of the most influential Latin American musicians in the last fifty years, was asked by the Colombian Soccer Federation to bring together barristas, or supporters, from different rival teams in Colombia to reinterpret his own classics and turn them into fan chants for the Colombian National Team, in the lead up to the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup… This is how everything comes full circle… a pop music icon now rewriting his own songs with fan groups… for the fan groups… to support their national team.
[CARLOS VIVES]
And, if there’s a secret to football fan chants is that they are the longest continuously-running cover-song tradition in modern pop music. Older than rock and roll. Older than the music industry itself. They predate streaming. They predate Spotify. They predate copyright lawsuits. They will outlast all of them. Because they don’t need anyone’s permission. They never have.
A working-class kid in Liverpool in 1963 hears “You’ll Never Walk Alone” on a stadium loudspeaker and starts singing along, because the kid grew up in music halls and his family sang. A hinchada in Buenos Aires in 1994 hears “Matador” on MTV and decides their team needs a version. A Wigan fan in 2016 hears “Freed From Desire” on a playlist and decides his striker needs a song. None of them got a meeting. None of them asked for permission. They just sang.
And in doing it, they built — accidentally, collectively, anonymously, beautifully — the largest, most globally distributed library of cover songs in human history. A library that nobody owns. A library that nobody licenses. A library that you can only access by going to a stadium and standing in the nosebleeds and singing along.
[Transition to outro.]
Outro
[Music settles. Reflective. Cinematic.]
So here’s what we covered today.
We started with West Ham United and a 1918 Broadway show tune about a kid in a Pears Soap advertisement that became, over the next century, the anthem of an East London football club. We watched Gerry & The Pacemakers take a Rodgers and Hammerstein funeral song from a 1945 Broadway musical and turn it, almost by accident, into the most famous football anthem in the world. We watched Argentine fans take a 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival song called “Bad Moon Rising” and use it to terrorize their Brazilian hosts at the 2014 World Cup — and discovered, in the same moment, that Manchester United fans had been singing the same melody for years without knowing. We followed a 1985 Italian disco song called “L’Estate Sta Finendo” as it crossed Italy, then Portugal, then ended up on the terraces of Anfield as “Allez Allez Allez.” We watched Los Fabulosos Cadillacs write a song about Latin American dictatorship and end up writing the most-adapted football chant in South America. And we watched a Wigan fan named Sean Kennedy, in May 2016, type eleven new syllables onto a 1996 Italian dance song and turn an unknown Northern Irish striker into a continental phenomenon.
Here’s what I think the football chant tradition actually teaches us about cover songs.
The music industry as we know it — the labels, the publishers, the streaming platforms, the royalty calculations, the copyright lawyers — operates on a single core assumption. The assumption is that the song belongs to the artist. The artist makes the song. The artist licenses the song. Other people pay to use it.
Football fan chants prove that, at the deepest cultural level, that assumption is partly wrong.
Because what fans have been doing for a hundred years — collectively, anonymously, joyously — is taking the melodies that the music industry produces and giving them back to themselves. Not as imitation. Not as theft. Not as parody. But as something older than any of those things. As folk music. As songs that have been collectivized in real time. Songs that exist not because somebody owns them, but because somebody loved them enough to sing them with sixty thousand strangers in a stadium on a Tuesday night.
“You’ll Never Walk Alone” is not Rodgers and Hammerstein’s song anymore. Or, rather: it is theirs, but it is also Liverpool’s. It is also Celtic’s. It is also Dortmund’s. It is also a 99-year-old British veteran named Captain Tom Moore’s. The song doesn’t belong to one place. It belongs to anyone who needs it. And the proof that it belongs to them is the proof of every collective: they sing it together, and nobody can stop them. That is exactly what Carlos Vives is doing now with own songs. That is what La Mosca did with Muchachos and helped Argentina win the World Cup in 2022.
Pop music made the football chant possible. But football fans, in return, did something even bigger. They proved that songs can outgrow their authors. That melodies can travel further than copyright. That a great pop song, in the end, belongs to whoever loves it enough to make it theirs.
That is the deepest reason “Uncovering the Cover” exists. Because every great cover song is, at heart, an act of love. And the football terraces have been performing that act of love — for a hundred years, in dozens of languages, across every continent — without ever once asking permission.
[Music up.]
This has been Uncovering the Cover, “Songs of the Hinchada: How Football Fans Stole the World’s Best Pop Songs — and Made Them Their Own.” 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!