For a long time now, I’ve been quite fascinated by music used at sports events and especially the lack of creativity herein. I’m a big football fan myself and I very regularly visit games of the team I support but the songs you will hear being sung by supporters in a (Dutch) football stadium will be very similar at pretty much every single ground you can possibly visit, the only difference being the lyrics catered to the home team being supported. Songs originally used at football grounds in Italy, France, Germany, or Spain are now copied and claimed by every single team under the sun which makes me wonder: why is it so hard to come up with an original supporters chant? No more ‘Allez Allez Allez‘, endless adaptations of ‘Seven Nation Army’, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, or ‘Freed From Desire’, or – God knows why – the Pippi Longstocking theme tune. Instead, pick out a catchy beat or melody, write some clever lyrics that set you apart from all the other teams and make it easy to understand so everyone can sing along effortlessly.

Besides the (football) chants sung by the fans, there’s also the ‘regular’ music being played in sports stadiums before, during, or after a game. I recently went to an ice hockey game in the city I live in. Since ice hockey is a sport constantly being paused or put on-hold by the referee, an in-house DJ keeps the spirits high by playing short snippets of songs during every single stoppage of play which, in fairness, is quite an impressive feat since his arsenal of catchy tunes must be never-ending given the large amounts of breaks in this sport. Honestly, this DJ must’ve had at least 50 snappy fragments of classics ready to be blasted into the earholes of the 1,5 thousand visitors at every given moment during the game. Surprisingly enough, most of these were dated (dance) hits from 8 to 12 years ago. Since these musical snippets are so short (they last for mere seconds) it made me wonder: does it really matter what song you play? Like, isn’t it just about the vibe and beat of a certain tune rather than recognisability? I mean, it’s not that the crowd will have a horrible night at the ice hockey game and leave just because the DJ was playing a local dance act rather than David Guetta, right? To be fair, I wonder if the crowd cares about the music in the first place. Take today’s Jam, which surely is a very under-the-radar tune probably not known by the majority of people regularly visiting a sports stadium. If you would take the drop of this tune, at about 1:07 – 1:22, no one would give a toot whether that’s something they’re familiar with or not while at the same time, you will perhaps find this particular artist new fans and boost their popularity a bit. While watching the Winter Olympics a few weeks back, I thought the same: since the event was held in Italy, why not just play songs by locals acts to boost the musical economy of the home country? Surely you’ll be able to find enough powerful and uplifting local songs. Perhaps I should aim for a career switch and become a niche-music-promoter at sports events. Just pick out some cool songs potentially being liked by thousands of intoxicated adults being overly fanatic watching some kind of game often involving a round-ish item that needs to be kicked, thrown, or hit by a tool. Seems achievable, right?