Fever Pitch: The Most Memorable Songs of the World Cup

Illustration by Joy Burke 

Every four years, the World Cup swallows the world whole, and on June 12, the Brazilian World Cup begins in São Paolo. Historically, FIFA's globe-hopping event has inspired the world's musicians to commemorate the tourney in official—and unofficial—capacities, resulting in some of captivatingly brilliant and gleefully strange music. As the Cup approaches, Pitchfork contributors have singled out some of the most memorable World Cup-related songs, featuring tracks by New Order, Lightning Seeds, Fat Les, Toni Braxton, Daryl Hall, and many more. 

The Village People and Die Deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft: “Far Away in America” (1994) (full version)

In 1994, an executive at the German Football Association presumably decided to undertake a little intercontinental bridge building in advance of that year’s World Cup, which was held in these United States. Searching for some hot young talent from across the Atlantic to pair with the team, they somehow twirled their filofax and landed on the Village People, whose last U.S. hit was 1979's thematically disastrous “Ready for the 80’s”. Sadly, neither the 80s or the 90s were ready for the Village People, and nor were Die Deutsche Fußballnationalmannschaft, judging by the looks on the players’ faces in the accompanying video.

Watching soccer players appear in music videos is a unique study in terror. These are athletes at the top of their game, usually so confident and assured. But as soon as that camera rolls a cardboard-like stiffness sets in, all the face muscles tense up, and the only movement they’re capable of is a rigid side-to-side shuffle. Look closely, though, and you’ll see an exception to the rule here: Jürgen Klinsmann and his tousled blonde locks, bouncing away in a carefree manner, seemingly at ease with this whole “America” thing and perhaps even inspired by the Village People’s clunky nationalist browbeating. Where is Klinsmann these days? He’s about to lead out the USA team as head coach at this summer’s tournament. I like to think that somewhere, right now, he’s firing up that video and getting riled up like it’s ‘94 all over again. —NICK NEYLAND

Lightning Seeds: "Three Lions '98" (1998)

Though the Lightning Seeds’ bummed soccer ode “Three Lions” was originally crafted in 1996 (to memorialize Gareth Southgate’s penalty miss that kept England out of the European Cup Final) the World Up edition “Three Lions ‘98” was the one I heard first and the version that continues to resonate with me most. Even before you trace the song’s ascension into a full-blown phenomenon, “Three Lions ‘98” is a flat-out great Britpop song, containing such catchy clusters of hooks and a soaring chorus whose transformation into a stadium chant was less a stroke of luck than a matter of time. (Personally, as someone who is possibly too emotionally connected to the their favorite teams' outcomes, the whole "No plans for final day/ Stay in bed, drift away" thing.... BEEN THERE.)

Though the universe of “Three Lions ‘98” operates under sunnier skies—Ian Broudie and Co. recast the song with a “things are going to be different this time!” optimism as opposed to the original’s dour, so-it-fucking-goes worldview—the video is where you feel the song’s energy coming through. Broudie and co-writers Frank Skinner and David Baddiel hit the raining streets, basking in a new confidence as they talk shit and challenge a group of German supporters to a parking lot pickup game.

Football did not come home that year; England got bumped in the round of 16 in penalties, in a similar fashion to the way they exited the European Championships two years prior. (The new “Three Lions”, though, fared better by reaching #1 on the UK chart). Football, it turns out, wasn't "coming home" that year, but in this case, that's just unecessary context that spoils an otherwise spotless song.—CORBAN GOBLE

Il Divo and Toni Braxton: "Time of Our Lives" (2006)

In the summer of 2006, I was 17 years old and there were few things I enjoyed more than getting drunk and gyrating with other teenagers against a backdrop of loud pop music. So you can imagine my disappointment when FIFA unveiled a slow, melodramatic ballad as the official anthem of the 2006 World Cup. “The Time of Our Lives” was an international, multi-genre collaboration between 90s R&B star Toni Braxton and Il Divo, Simon Cowell’s operatic pop boy band, that managed to drag on in both English and Spanish despite the tournament being held in Germany that year.

“The Time of Our Lives” tried to be too many things for too many people, and in doing so only succeeded in becoming one of the least inspirational World Cup songs. It takes almost two minutes before we hear anything but Braxton’s airy voice, only to be joined by three non-native Spanish speakers singing in Spanish (and one native speaker, who definitely should’ve vetoed lyrics like "It is the passion to succeed"). In any case, I'm guessing the number of players who listened to this song before any game that year was approximately zero.

As the song FINALLY starts to pick up in the last thirty seconds, an ill-conceived fireworks display coupled with Braxton’s barely mid-thigh dress ends up revealing the better part of Braxton’s lower-half, and she doesn’t even flinch. I remember my teenage self taking note of her graceful recovery and ability to pretend like no one had seen any of this happen, and I guess that same logic could be applied to several soccer game scenarios. So thank you, Toni, for the small life lesson in an otherwise truly unremarkable song.—ALLISON MCCANN

Daryl Hall: "Gloryland" (1994)

We live in an age of American soccer enlightenment. Our domestic league is alive and well; Landon Donovan is trending on Twitter. But for the vast majority of the United States in 1994, soccer existed in a foreign compartment—the same one where the population kept thoughts of, say, Ravi Shankar, right up until he actually came to play in their town. Soccer was something the others did, but now they were going to do it here. 

So we responded by welcoming them. To the not-so-humbly-named "Gloryland". 

“Believe in what you do/ And you've the strength to see it through/ On the road to Gloryland”. Daryl Hall forcefully guts out. The implicit meaning: After a long qualification process in some (probably) repugnant shithole, now players, their fans, their nation can finally set their focus on The Greatest Country In The World. 

Of course, Gloryland hosted the World Cup not because of its soccer passion, but because of its flair for manufacturing mass appeal (the 1994 World Cup is still the best-attended in history). Hit machine Daryl Hall may have been tapped to sing this song for a similar reason; the “It’s in your heart/It’s in your hands” line in the chorus comes off as incredibly tone-deaf in a sport that specifically forbids the use of hands. Where most World Cup anthems emphasize world unity or, at the very least, some mode of celebration, Hall’s four-and-a-half minute dirge comes off as one big, overwrought “Look at America!” Hall performed it in 1994’s similarly-extravagant opening ceremony, which also featured Diana Ross taking a penalty kick on a fake goal. Like “Gloryland”, her effort went well wide of the mark. —ALEX ABNOS

Fat Les: "Vindaloo" (1998)

Through the mid-to-late ’90s, I was an ardent Anglophile—an easy thing to be in Toronto, given its large English-expat population, bounty of record stores stocked with the latest U.K. imports, and a popular Saturday-night dance party boasting the nom de mod Blow Up. But even while spending an inordinate amount of my fledgling-freelancer’s income on $15 import copies of Select magazine and zip-up tennis jackets, I could never abide by the footie fandom that would inspire fellow Brit enthusiasts to wake up at obscenely early hours on weekends to watch Man United matches at local pubs. To me, sports and indie rock were ideological opposites, yet the North American appreciation of Britpop always seemed to be intertwined with an equally fervent embrace of the country’s soccer-lad culture. (Do British fans of Nirvana and Mudhoney stay up into the wee hours watching satellite broadcasts of Monday Night Football?) And of all major profressional sports, the appeal of soccer mystified me the most... like, how was an infamous tradition of hooliganism and rioting ever inspired by a game that puttered about aimlessly for two hours and always seemed to be tied at 1-1?

In June of 1998, I embarked upon a post-graduation backpack trip through the U.K., for purely music-nerd reasons: attend my first Glastonbury festival; walk down the Berwick Street record-store row that appears on the cover of (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?; spend half a day scouring the streets of Cardiff to track down the Super Furry Animals’ fabled Acid Casuals boutique. But from my first tube ride from Heathrow, I was reminded that I had unwittingly wandered in to the eye of World Cup season: A group of young preteen girls at the back of the train car were loudly singing in unison, “Vindaloo! Vindaloo! Vindaloo!” I had never heard the song before, yet I knew exactly what it was: the new soccer-themed single from Fat Les, a supergroup of sorts featuring Alex from Blur and the drug dealer from Trainspotting (now better known as Lily Allen’s dad) that I had skimmed over in the NME, but did not investigate further. Over the next three weeks, that one-word, curry-spiced chorus followed me around England like it was my own personal Benny Hill theme song—in pubs, in record stores, in impromptu singalongs by packs of drunkards sloshing through the sodden fields of Glastonbury.

But it wasn’t until I saw the video that I realized “Vindaloo” was not just some yobbo clarion call, but a glorious piss-take of everything that Britain held dear: nationalism, superiority, tea-drinking (and, at the time, Verve videos). In lieu of a patriotic pledge to the crown, we have a rallying cry named for a cheap take-out dish popularized by England’s largest visible minority. Instead of a parade of Beckham-ian superhuman athletes, we get a multicultural circus of walk-of-shamed prostitutes, baby-powdered sumo wrestlers, and the future stars of Little Britain with arrows and cleavers stuck in their heads. And yet, by reducing the vaguely valorious platitudes of so many other World Cup songs to pure, petty oneupmanship (“We’re gonna score/ One more than you!”) and schoolyard-grade “na na na” taunts, “Vindaloo” ultimately dismantled my philosophical fallacy that sports and rock‘n’roll fandom were incompatible. As the song proves, the defining qualities of both pastimes—illogical tribalism, public intoxication, and making an obnoxious racket—are really one and the same.—STUART BERMAN

Weezer: "Represent" (2010)

Shakira: "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)" (2010)

Shakira’s Official FIFA Song for the 2010 South Africa World Cup, ”Waka Waka (Song for Africa)”, is a somewhat culturally tone-deaf number, and also the eighth most-watched YouTube video of all time. It’s colorful and catchy, in a way that if you’re not expressly looking for the cultural THIS IS AFRICA misappropriations scattered throughout, you just might get swept up in the fun. They got a blue-jean-bedecked Messi wearing a lion print t-shirt to kick a ball in the video! That counts as activism right? Nothing I could tell you right now could diminish the popularity of this song. It's a really fucking popular song.

Though the video’s message is clumsy, its heart (and its soca rhythm) is in the right place. “Waka Waka” samples “Zangaléwa”, a hit by the Cameroonian group Golden Sounds and pays homage to Surinam-Dutch outfit Trafassi, which is as deep as something like this can probably go and still win over a conference call. The power and reverberation of "Waka Waka" is such that Shakira's new World Cup song, "LaLaLa", is the the most popular song from this year's World Cup compilation album, despite not being chosen as the offical song or the official anthem.

The people have spoken. The people want Shakira.—CORBAN GOBLE

Ennio Morricone: “El Mundial” (1978)

The 1978 World Cup was an odd tournament, with a lone Scotsman showing the Netherlands how to really play total football, defending World Champions West Germany getting knocked out by Austria, and hosts Argentina facing accusations of dirty tactics by purposefully delaying the final. It may also be the only final largely played on a bed of confetti. Like I said, it was a weird Cup.

Another unusual occurrence was the selection of a film composer to come up with the official song—a good idea, but one FIFA has rarely returned to since. Ennio Morricone, busy elsewhere recording the soundtrack to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven that year, came up with a somber piece that fills exactly none of the criteria you’d expect from a tournament song: it’s not lively, or inspiring, or in any way joyous. What were you thinking, Ennio? Instead, it sounds like a scrap from one of Morricone’s spaghetti western scores that he’d twirled around his fork and let slip onto the studio floor. "El Mundial" was a thrill for aficionados of his work, but not much use if you’re a Mexico fan stuck on the terraces in Rosario, desperately searching for inspiration while watching your team get soundly beaten by Tunisia. —NICK NEYLAND

Pitbull: "We Are One (Ole Ola)" [ft. Jennifer Lopez and Claudia Leitte] (2014)

Something important to remember about the World’s Biggest Event: With all the money changing hands and flowing into FIFA execs' Swiss Bank accounts (and to referrees accused of fixing matches), some of the biggest worldwide conglomerates set up sponsorships to invest in the massive take from the Cup. When I was in Johannesberg and other cities in South Africa for 2010’s Cup, I was able to partake in the local food and the (very bad) domestic beer everywhere I went except for the confines of the grounds, where it was all Budweiser, Frito Lay, and lamb hot dogs from a faceless kosher conglomerate that I can’t remember the name of. (You could buy 20 beers at a time if you wanted though. I remember a group of English supporters who would buy a crate of beer, haul it back to the bleachers, and then return to fill up the empty crate.)

So, if you’re a corporation (say, Coca-Cola) funding a song that’s designed from the top-down to be a global hit, you tend to make safe, uncontroversial choices. This year the suits hit up proven anthem-makers Pitbull and J. Lo to create the whistling pump-up jam “Ole Ola” (no matter that neither have ties to Brazil), which is catchy as something this calculated could be. The song/branding opportunity's string-pullers brought in Brazilian star Claudia Leitte to give the song a measure of authenticity. It's uplifting, in a kind of scientific way.

For this Cup, listening to "Ole Ola" feels like peering into a fantasy. The dark clouds of Brazilian unrest or the smoke from the human rights catastrophe at the 2022 World Cup Qatari site have no place in the golden, we-are-one world of 2014’s Official World Cup song. All that "Ole Ola" has to say is that, in eyes of the biggest companies of the world, the FIFA World Cup and the bottom line are one.—CORBAN GOBLE

New Order: “World in Motion” (1990)

England’s efforts at providing a rousing song to send their boys off into battle had reached a nadir by the time New Order were contacted to provide “World in Motion” in 1990. The dreary official team song for the 1982 tournament, “This Time (We’ll Get It Right)”, even has a vague air of depression hanging over it—you can hear the sound of defeat sagging from the players’ voices. But by 1990 Bernard Sumner and his band were guzzling as much ecstasy as they could get their hands on, making them the perfect choice to provide a spirited anthem for the team, even if their desire to call the track "E for England" was sadly vetoed by the stuffy English Football Association.

With actor (and Lily’s dad) Keith Allen on board for his first venture into a mini-career writing these things, New Order mostly ignored the conventional team-effort approach to soccer songs, instead crafting a track in the lineage of their classic pop material (“Bizarre Love Triangle”, “True Faith”) with a few sporting touches thrown in. Until, that is, you get to the infamous rap provided by Liverpool player John Barnes, a man who looks and sounds paralyzed by fear in the video, as you might expect from someone required to deliver lines like: “catch me if you can/’cause I'm the England man."

Fortunately for Barnes, England’s exit in the semi-final of the tournament will be remembered as a far more painful experience than his mercifully brief musical career. —NICK NEYLAND

K'naan: "Wavin' Flag" (2010)

Entering the third group game of the 2010 World Cup, South Africa needed a win against France, a Mexico or Uruguay loss, and a goal differential swing of at least five in its favor to advance to the Round of 16. Lloyd Christmas had a better chance than the hosts. Except, weirdly, suddenly, Bafana Bafana had a shot at life beyond the group stage. In the 20th minute at Free State Stadium in Bloemfontein, Bongani Khumalo put the home team up 1-0. Katlego Mphela doubled the advantage in the 37th.

As he scored, three friends and I stood in the meat isle of grocery store near Hartbeespoort Dam, 90 minutes north of Johannesburg. The place erupted, clerks high-fiving patrons, stock boys no longer bothering even to pretend they were putting goods on shelves. Wide smiles everywhere, ours included. While my memory's a little fuzzy from the excitement, I'm fairly confident that K'naan was playing his World Cup anthem in the cereal isle while the entire store focused on a 24-inch television above a register.

Talk about how soccer brings people/communities/countries/[insert a group] together is mostly bullshit, correlation not equaling causation or just plain lazy. Too often, there's no great revelation. Just as there would be no great advancement surprise for South Africa. But individual moments can really matter. You learn that you don't need a miracle to wave your flag. Or, while we're here, another country's.—NOAH DAVIS

Vangelis: "Anthem" (2002)

As an Englishman, my abiding memory of the 2002 World Cup is of England goalkeeper David Seaman sluggishly leaping into the air, his arms flailing, his large ponytail flapping, as a shot from Brazil’s Ronaldinho arched over his head and into the goal. The hurt in Seaman’s eyes was haunting, but not as haunting as “Anthem” by Vangelis, the improbable choice of official song by whomever it is who gets to decide these things. The Greek composer, born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou, helped trigger a wanton overuse of the term “dystopian future” with his Blade Runner soundtrack, but he wasn’t a total outlier in this field. Vangelis composed the music for the 2000 Olympics, although whether the tournament organizers were familiar with his double album opus with Aphrodite's Child, 666 (The Apocalypse of John, 13/18), remains unclear. Sadly, there was to be no repeat of that record’s "∞", which features the sound of a woman simulating orgasm. Instead, we got something akin to his Chariots of Fire work, with “Anthem” pegged as a slow-build piece that moves from forlorn sighs to orchestral bursts so mercurial it feels like a celestial being is about to descend down to Earth. Which is probably the kind of intervention holders France were hoping for when they were humiliated with a first round exit from the tournament. —NICK NEYLAND

Lonnie Donegan: "World Cup Willie" (1966)

R. Kelly: "Sign of a Victory" (2010)

You can virtually see the white board that begat R. Kelly's 2010 World Cup Anthem, with phrases like "chant," "anthem," "uplifting," "mention of a flag" and "soulful local choir" strewn about. So here we find Kelly on his "I Believe I Can Fly", singing the shit out of generic plesantries like "I can see the colors of the rainbow" and "I see the light at the end of the tunnel." (Personal favorite: "You open your eyes to global warming." So I guess Ford wasn't in on this one!)

And yet, despite how heavy-handed and on-the-nose "Sign of a Victory" is, it's absolutely and undeniably effective. Where Shakira's South Africa imagery felt forced and fake, R. Kelly strolling around Soweto and singing from rooftops seems... joyful? Natural? It's probably not, but such is the effect of the "Sign of a Victory."

I attended the Opening Ceremony in Soccer City, and before the opening game between Mexico and host South Africa kicked, R. Kelly performed "Sign of a Victory" in something that looked full chainmail. It might have been the fact that I was in that stadium, among South Africans and international tourists that had fantasized about this moment for eight years, blowing the now-banned vuvezelas like goddamn fiends, but Kelly's performance felt genuinely moving.—CORBAN GOBLE

Ricky Martin: "The Cup of Life" (1998)

If World Cup songs are ever given their own textbook—and universe willing, they someday will be—Ricky Martin's 1998 smash "The Cup of Life" would be the standard-bearer for the whole genre. It has everything you look for in a World Cup song. A giant, soaring chorus. A rhythm and horns section going absolutely batshit as they maniacally pound out a mambo beat. A sheet of lyrics that starts with the word "Ole!" and builds from there. A mysterious bubble-icious Europop trance that strings the whole thing together. Ricky screams: "Do you really want it?!" Did we ever have a choice?—CORBAN GOBLE