Football has never been silent. Before broadcast rights, before sponsors and before anyone owned a phone, crowds sang — badly, loudly, in unison, borrowing melodies from hymns, folk songs and whatever was on the radio.
What has changed over the past decade is not that football has music. It is who decides which music, and how quickly that decision spreads.
Era one: the terrace
For most of the twentieth century, football's music was made by the crowd. Chants were oral culture: adapted, mutated, passed between cities. A melody would arrive from a pop hit and leave as something unrecognisable, rewritten for a striker's name.
This music had no distribution problem because it had no distribution — it existed only in the ground. Its power came from the fact that thirty thousand people had to agree, in real time, on both the words and the timing.
Era two: the PA system
Then clubs took the microphone. Goal music, walk-out songs, pre-match playlists and licensed anthems turned the stadium into a programmed environment. The choices were commercial and centralised, and they aged fast.
This era gave football some genuine standards and a great deal of filler. It also created a habit that still shapes the game: the expectation that a moment should have a soundtrack attached to it.
Era three: the dressing room
The important shift happened out of sight. As squads became more international, the dressing-room speaker became the most influential playlist in football — chosen by players, dominated by Latin, Caribbean and African music, and completely invisible to broadcasters.
When clubs started posting behind-the-scenes footage, that hidden playlist went public. Fans heard what players actually listen to, and it looked nothing like the PA system's output.
Era four: the edit
Short video finished the job. An edit account with no budget can attach a song to a player permanently, and the attachment sticks because it is repeated thousands of times by thousands of accounts.
This is how Don Miguelo's "Y Que Fue?" became a Lamine Yamal song years before it appeared at Spain's 2026 World Cup celebration in Madrid. The internet made the association; the celebration confirmed it in front of a crowd estimated around 1.8 million people.
Why Latin music took over
Three forces converged. Squad demographics made Spanish and Portuguese-language music the default in dressing rooms. Streaming removed the geographic gatekeeping that once kept regional scenes regional. And the rhythms themselves — dembow, Brazilian funk, reggaeton — happen to be structurally perfect for short video.
None of that was planned by a marketing department. It is one of the rare cases where the audience, the athletes and the algorithm all pulled in the same direction.
What it means for artists
Football is now a distribution channel. A track that catches in edit culture reaches an audience that no radio format can deliver, and it reaches them repeatedly, attached to emotion. Older records get second lives; new records get written with clipping in mind.
The risk is obvious: music optimised for fifteen seconds can be forgettable at three minutes. The artists who last are the ones whose catalogue survives the trip out of the edit.
Where it goes next
The direction of travel is toward players as curators. Walk-out songs chosen personally, celebration tracks that outlive the celebration, playlists that function as a public statement of identity. Spain's Madrid parade — every player introduced with a song of their own — was the clearest version of that idea yet staged.
Football's soundtrack has come full circle. It started with the crowd choosing, went through decades of institutions choosing, and has ended up with the crowd and the players choosing together.
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