Get free access to the most comprehensive World Cup coverage in The Athletic app
Atlanta Braves center fielder Michael Harris II became a folk hero to strangers this week
Having spent the afternoon watching England beat the Democratic Republic of Congo 2-1 in a World Cup match across town, a few hundred English soccer fans had wedged into a section of Truist Park in Atlanta for the Braves’ MLB game against the St. Louis Cardinals
The closest player to their seats was Harris, and by the middle innings, he had his own catalogue of chants
“Walking in a Harris wonderland”, “Baseball’s coming home — with Michael Harris,” to the tune of England fans’ own “Three Lions” and a request — “Harris, give us a wave!”, repeated until he relented — were all heard
He went 1 for 4 with a run batted in, threw a ball into their section, and after the last out, traded his cap for one of their jerseys
The sounds of Wembley being brought to Truist Park 🤣
England fans chanted for Michael Harris II, then he caught the fly ball! #WorldCuppic.twitter.com/Zec3aNsYsx
There were similar scenes when Scottish fans took over Boston and attended a Red Sox game at Fenway Park
For a U.S. sports fan, it was charming to watch. It is also two fan cultures colliding. But who thinks of these chants? And then how are they started in the stadium? And, more importantly, why is this rarely seen at U.S. sporting events?
I didn’t have an answer, so I went looking for people who might
What You Should Read Next
No Scotland, no party: Inside the Tartan Army takeover of Boston
From the mass consumption of Irn-Bru to the attempted legalisation of haggis, Scotland fans have made a big impression on Boston
Billy Grant, from Brentford, west London, has been to nine World Cups. He is English and a devoted Brentford fan (he hosts the Beesotted Brentford Pride of West London podcast), but he also has strong ties to the States
When his parents moved to the United States, he chose to stay in England. Grant follows Charlotte FC in MLS and has been to many MLS stadiums, which gives him a foot in both camps
I called him as he was flying back to the U.K. from Atlanta. He described how an English chant is actually made. It sounded like a supply chain
“People will be sitting in a pub or on a train going to the away game, singing a song about a particular player,” Billy says
“When they left the station, there was no song. By the time they got to the away game, there was a song. And then the song starts at the home game.”
So who actually lights the fuse?
Tom Clark, a British sociologist, spent the 2002–03 season in the stands at Scunthorpe United, a team in the north of England who regularly lose, recording what the crowd sang and turning it into a paper titled “I’m Scunthorpe ’til I die.” (He and Edward Mainwaring wrote another: “We’re s–t and we know we are”, after another common chant among struggling soccer teams.)
Clark says it is rarely a random person who starts the chants
“There’s usually one, two or three leaders — people who will just stand up and start a chant,” Clark, 46, says. “Then other people will join in.”
It doesn’t always work. At lower-league games, he’s watched chants die on the spot, “and everyone takes the p*** out of them.”
Police on the pitch in January 2003 at Glanford Park, where Tom Clark watched Scunthorpe for his paper on chanting (Gary M. Prior/Getty Images)
What decides it is often the game itself
“If there’s an exciting period of play — someone has a shot, it nearly goes in — that’s an elevated sense of emotion, and there’s much more chance of everyone joining in.” A dull match, on the other hand, is when the crowd turns to banter instead, “because there’s more room for it”
The chants run on spontaneity and humor, and on the places where fans gather: the pub, the shared train to away games, the walk to the ground
“That’s a very important part of football culture,” Grant said. Americans, he noted, “may go in cars, (in) twos or threes”
There is a clear difference here between the U.S. and soccer fan culture from England and the rest of the world. Premier League clubs will often have thousands of fans supporting them at away (or road) games. Even clubs lower down the leagues will take a travelling support in the hundreds. And they may all travel together on trains, or coaches, giving the communal gathering that would allow chants to ferment
As Grant noted, this is just not possible due to travel distances in the U.S
Michael “Grubes” Gruber spent years as an in-arena music director for the Dallas Stars and the Texas Rangers, cueing the music between plays. He was paid, in effect, to anticipate where the energy of a game might move and to push fans along with sound
When I sent him the Harris clip, he loved it. “That group likely knew very little about Harris,” he said. “But they didn’t let it stop them.”
He says the reason this rarely happens in the U.S. is that here, unlike in England or the rest of the world, the crowd is not the sound system to a soccer game. It’s his fault, essentially
“It’s tough for a song to happen spontaneously,” he said. “Because they have to time it when the D.J. isn’t playing. Fans have gotten used to being prompted,” Gruber says
British sociologist Clark wrote that modern football keeps pushing towards every club sanded down into the same globalized product, with more borrowed traditions and broader appeals to a larger fanbase. Chanting, Clark told me, is how fans push back
“Chants descend from folk ballads,” he says, “where you would change the story to local characters. They’re meant to be dynamic. They’re meant to have their own lives”
That is where the American problem starts to look structural
A folk song, Clark told me, assumes a shared past, and a shared past assumes the club stayed put long enough to have one. American franchises don’t always offer that guarantee. When the Crew nearly left Columbus for Austin in 2017, supporters fighting the move were also fighting to preserve the drum lines, the in-jokes built over two decades in one stadium
The singing fans, in many countries, Clark adds, are mostly working-class customers, the same people the modern game has spent 30 years pricing out in favor of families, tourists and suites
<img src="https://comicvibe.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/GettyImages-877288400-scaled-1.jpg" alt='Columbus Crew fans pictured protesting their proposed move in 2017, with one holding a scarf emblazoned with “#SaveTheCrew”‘>
Crew fans in 2017 protesting their proposed move (Kirk Irwin/Getty Images)
Katie Jordan, 36, does not watch Atlanta United matches so much as work them. She plays drums in the Resurgence supporters’ section and her game day starts before dawn: loading the drums onto the stand, a tailgate, a march into the stadium, then ninety minutes of drumming
She has stood in stands in England, too, and was honest about the ways American chanting is handed to the crowd rather than grown by it. The words are posted online on the Resurgence website, accessible them. “As far as Americans and how we consume things, we need something ready-made,” she says
Then she described the experience at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium
“Half of our chants are in Spanish,” she said. “Even the chants in English have Latin drum beats.” The club leaned into Latin American supporter culture, its drums and smoke and flares, and then grafted local material on top
One of her favorite supporter songs, “Ball and Parlay”, is borrowed from the drumline tradition of Tuskegee University, one of America’s historically Black colleges
“We are intentional about inclusion across all demographics,” Jordan said. “We welcome folks in. It is not long before people are just partying with their neighbor.”
Atlanta fans during an MLS Cup 2024 playoffs match against Inter Miami at Mercedes-Benz Stadium (Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP via Getty Images)
Atlanta’s supporters also coordinate directly with the front office. The club tells them if it doesn’t want a song at a particular moment; otherwise, the atmosphere is theirs
This would be inconceivable in other sporting cultures around the world
One thing they cannot do is what most crowds around the world do without thinking
“We’ve all seen reels of English fans who are making fun of a player’s haircut or their own teams not even scoring a goal, so there’s definitely a spirit there that is unique and different,” says Jordan
“We do have a little bit of that, but we are limited. The English are yelling out s-words and c-words en masse, and if we were to do that with a bullhorn in a stadium, we would get kicked out.”
Inside those limits, and on top of what they’ve borrowed, Atlanta United fans have built something else
Les Back, a sociologist at the University of Glasgow and lifelong Millwall fan, made a Radio 4 program about football songs and chants
When I suggested Americans are only doing karaoke of the real thing, he disagreed. English soccer, he pointed out, is being remade by imported habits: the choreographed banners and flares of the Italian and Spanish ultras, the theatrical supporter culture of continental Europe. These can be seen at stadia such as Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park in the Premier League, where their Holmesdale Fanatics adopt many of the European ultras’ customs
“All culture is appropriated because all culture is learned,” Back said. What American fans are doing “is just the version that’s happening now. And they’re using the re
Crystal Palace’s Holmesdale Fanatics at Selhurst Park (Sebastian Frej/MB Media/Getty Images)
Chants are secular hymns, he said, and you can’t argue with a hymn; you sing it, or you don’t. He’s watched racist chants die in the air, summoned to taunt some player and then starved because the people nearby wouldn’t lend their voices. The crowd votes, and it votes by singing or staying silent
Offensive chants have not always been drowned out or disowned in the UK, Europe and beyond. Racist chanting in grounds has been heard since the 1960s and though less common now, it has not been eradicated, as recent examples of the abuse of Real Madrid’s Vinicius Junior show. Separately, there continues to be an issue over Mexican fans’ use of a homophobic chant, examples of which have been heard during this World Cup
What You Should Read Next
The homophobic chant that hangs over World Cup hosts Mexico and its soccer team
Many are fearful about fans again using a homophobic slur that has led FIFA to fine them more than $1million over the past decade
The Braves fans, the American fans who joined in or at least savored the novelty, enjoyed the experience brought to them by that small group of England soccer fans
Americans have shown they can adopt their own songs and chants — they just tend to come from stranger places than a pub singalong. The USMNT’s enduring “I believe that we will win” chant was created in 1998 by a Naval Academy Prep School student for his platoon. It spread through the Army-Navy game and college sports for over a decade before reaching U.S. soccer in 2011, and by the 2014 World Cup, it had fully caught on
Much like the English chants described by Grant, it transitioned organically between crowds, just over a much longer period of time
And it’s a path that runs through exactly the place Jordan told me to look. “College football is probably the best comparison,” Jordan says. She was on the drumline team at the University of Georgia. “That’s where the tradition runs the deepest. (Songs) that have their roots, they’re not going anywhere.”
Those roots are taking hold in places like MLS supporters’ sections, even as what grows from them has to weather some of the same conditions battering English football: higher prices and a changing crowd
To skeptics who say the American version of soccer chants and songs isn’t the real thing, Back said to give it time
“It takes two or three generations to create a tradition. But traditions are created all the time.”
World Cup Tracker
Groups and standingsBracket forecast
Tournament schedule, scores and results
Forecasts for all 48 teams
