“Start with just a few words — chants that are easy to learn and that are repetitive,” says Max Jack, an ethnomusicologist who specializes in music and sports at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Chants like the frequently heard “olé, olé, olé” catch on quickly because they’re simple and often stay within a five- or six-note range. But most of the time, chants are familiar songs that have been adapted: “You might take a melody from a song you like, and you might just mess around with the words.” For example, fans of the Shamrock Rovers, a soccer club in the League of Ireland Premier Division, changed the chorus of Lykke Li’s song “I Follow Rivers” to “I, I, follow/I follow you, Shamrock Rovers.” (The same club has also been known to chant the lyrics to “Build Me Up Buttercup” without changing the lyrics at all. “They didn’t have their own home ground, the club went through all these hardships and the lyrics spoke to the hardships of the club,” Jack says.)
From “How to Start a Soccer Chant” by Max Jack, as told to Jaime Lowe for New York Times Magazine; Photo by Glyn Kirk/Agence France-Presse
