Dortmund’s Adele dressing-room anthem and the power of team singalongs: ‘It is a legal stimulant’

Jadon Sancho grabbed the boombox in the buzzing Borussia Dortmund dressing room. The team had just beaten Paris Saint-Germain to reach the Champions League final and it was time for celebration, time for Adele.

Soon, Someone Like You was belted out by the squad en masse, with Sancho, on loan from Manchester United, up on a table in the centre of the room, like a conductor overseeing his choir.

The heartfelt rendition of a song about a couple’s break-up and new beginnings suited Sancho’s backstory, and it wasn’t the first time he had sung it. The connection between song and team dates back years.

In 2021, after clinching the DFB-Pokal with a 4-1 win over RB Leipzig thanks to two goals from both Sancho and Erling Haaland, they were in full song. It was the Englishman — before his move to Old Trafford — who once again was at the centre, up on a platform, the team’s lead vocalist.

“This is our traditional winning song in the dressing room, and it started with the cup final,” a senior dressing-room source at Dortmund told The Athletic.

They will hope to be singing once again on June 1 after the final at Wembley, where Adele showed everyone how it’s supposed to be sung back in 2017 in front of 98,000 people.

The German club weren’t the first to give it the football dressing room treatment though.

“They sang our song, everyone’s signing our song,” former Chorley player, manager and now chairman Jamie Vermiglio tells The Athletic, with a smile. “We were definitely first. I wouldn’t say it became synonymous with us, but we did start it. I don’t think anyone’s going to go back to 2013-14 when we won promotion.”

The non-League side latched onto the Adele track not long after it was released in 2011 and before it began dominating charts around the world.

“I was playing at the time and we were just looking for a song to sing that brought us all together and that people knew the lyrics of,” he says. “We were trying all of the stereotypical ones and nothing seemed to work. We said, ‘Why don’t we just try this?’. Everyone started singing it, everyone seemed to know the words, especially the chorus.”

Despite being more melancholic than motivational, it became Chorley’s go-to sing-along banker after big wins. It cut through to a wider audience during their FA Cup run in 2020-21. Videos went viral of the sixth-tier team in full voice after wins against 2013 winners Wigan Athletic (3-2, round one) Peterborough United (2-1, round two) and Derby County (2-0 round three). “It got more traction from everyone else and became more renowned then,” says Vermiglio.

After the win against Derby, Adele posted a heart emoji in reply to the club’s official post on Twitter (now X). She also liked the post, which remains one of only two she has ever liked on the social media platform, on which she boasts 27million followers.

Chorley are proud of being trailblazers a decade ago. “Seeing Dortmund doing it brought back happy memories for me, for all the times that we’ve sung it, and we still sing it today after big victories,” says Vermiglio.

They face a quandary, however, due to new Irish boyband connections. Shane Lynch and Keith Duffy of Boyzone, alongside Brian McFadden of Westlife, have become involved in the club. “I joked in an interview that I didn’t know their songs, only Adele, but it was only banter,” says Vermiglio. “We’ve had a few suggestions (of their songs) and some of the lads are having a think.”

The number of teams adopting Adele’s classic shows no sign of slowing. England’s under-21s — including Cole Palmer, Anthony Gordon and James Trafford, players who have since been promoted to the senior squad — sang it after winning their 2023 European Championship triumph. This contrasts with the senior side, who have joined fans in singing Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline in the past.

Another team in yellow, non-League Maidstone United, supplied one of the most heartfelt renditions this year, going viral after a 2-0 FA Cup fourth-round shock at Ipswich. “It’s a symbol of a camaraderie you get within the team,” Maidstone’s Liam Sole tells The Athletic. “You spend so much time with everyone and when you pull something like that off it’s great to be together enjoying the moment.”

Teenager Riley Court sang through the tears in the dressing room at Portman Road. “He’s young, came through the academy, got his first pro contract and it was, like a lot of us, a first taste of something of that magnitude,” says Sole. “It’s quite an emotional song too, isn’t it?

“Every changing room is different, and there is no place like it and the vibe you get in there. But there is a bit of a macho thing going on, and for a song like that to be played is symbolic of a bit of a change (of culture).”

Before games, high-tempo music is often preferred but afterwards, the pace is less important.

“Post-match music does not need to be upbeat,” Professor Costas Karageorghis of Brunel University, who has studied footballers and their relationship with music, tells The Athletic. “It can be slow and anthemic, and therefore easier to sing along to.”

Karageorghis studied 34 players aged 16 to 23 at Premier League clubs in 2018. “Music can be a subconscious method of imbuing the atmosphere with that sense of unity. It might be there’s just one anthem to pull people together,” he says.

“Beyond cohesion, music offers performance gains. It is a legal drug. A stimulant. There’s something primeval about creating music with other people, as Chorley were doing, or even moving in time with music. Music gives us a sense we are pulling the strings, we are the masters of our own destiny, that we can achieve our objectives in a given, competitive context.“

In the build-up to the last senior European Championship in 2021, Scotland’s national team chose a more upbeat number: Yes Sir, I Can Boogie by 1970s disco outfit Baccara due to a quirky backstory.

It was adopted because defender Andrew Considine, a recent call-up, had, five years earlier, danced to the track in drag on his stag do and, after the video resurfaced, it inspired a singsong. The team celebrated their play-off victory in Serbia with a rendition and it has been part of the Tartan Army song list ever since.

“The key is that the celebration and the music bring people together again,” adds Karageorghis. “It’s a hugely pleasurable experience that takes us to the very core of what it means to be human: when we can sing and dance and celebrate a particular success. It creates a positive, aesthetic experience and makes us crave the same success on the pitch again.”

Random songs can catch light. Liverpool know all about that. After their dramatic Champions League final success of 2005 against AC Milan, Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire was sung in the dressing room in Istanbul. England’s cricket team picked it up the following year on a tour of India. In recent years, Liverpool have adopted Dua Lipa’s One Kiss, signing along as they clinched the Carabao Cup, the final trophy of Jurgen Klopp’s reign.

Singing happens away from the dressing room, too. Former Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard gave oxygen to the Kolo-Yaya chant, a celebration of the Toure brothers to the tune of No Limit by 2 Unlimited, on a post-2014-15 season trip to Dubai. Gerrard had just played his final campaign, losing 6-1 at Stoke on the final day, but was keen to let his hair down on the team bonding trip.

“We had to go up an escalator and I went ahead so I could film the boys. They looked good singing and dancing together,“ Gerrard explained in his autobiography, My Story. “Next thing I know, Mamadou Sakho grabbed my phone. I could have stayed out but, f*** it, I am the captain. I lead from the front. So I raced over to the front of the dancing and singing crew. I took charge. I got into it big time.”

“How else, but through football, my undying passion, could I have ended up here, feeling so blissfully crazy, singing in Dubai about two brothers from the Ivory Coast, one a team-mate and the other an old rival from Manchester City?” Other teams, including England’s women, followed suit with their own renditions.

Some choose to sing a ballad post-match, but others don’t have such ‘strong beliefs’… get it? Freed from Desire by Gala, the easily adaptable club banger, is often the first track on post-match playlists when things have gone well. It was originally commandeered by Northern Ireland supporters to pay homage to striker Will Grigg, who was ‘on fire’ and thus defences around Europe were ‘terrified’.

go-deeper

Now everyone adapts it to suit.

After Manchester City won the Champions League and completed the treble, Jack Grealish put down a can of Heineken in the dressing room in Istanbul to quickly curate ‘Rodri’s on fire’ to honour the goalscorer against Inter Milan.

West Ham United’s Europa Conference League final win against Fiorentina was followed by numerous team renditions of the same song adapted to mark Jarrod Bowen’s winner. The less said about the following line regarding his partner, Dani Dyer, the better.

Argentina’s post-2022 World Cup-winning dressing room was frenzied. There were numerous renditions of the nation’s footballing anthem Muchachos — as there had been throughout the tournament by fans. They also poked fun at their opponents France, with Aston Villa goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez at the centre.

Wearing winner’s medals, the squad’s conga to “Un minuto de silencio” (A moment of silence) faux-mourned rivals, including beaten finalist Kylian Mbappe. During one of the song’s pauses, Martinez shouted, “Mbappe, who is dead!” Before leading his team-mates in another verse: “Ae, ae, ae, ae, un minuto de silencio…”

Provocative — albeit pretty harmless — chants such as Argentina’s celebrations have cropped up in dressing rooms elsewhere — especially when emotions are high.

Derby County manager Frank Lampard had been taunted by Leeds United fans during the 2018-19 season, but got his own back. Leeds fans felt he had made too much of the spying accusations against opposition manager Marcelo Bielsa earlier in the season, so, using the tune of Stop Crying Your Heart Out by Oasis, adapted the lyrics to include Lampard’s name.

When Derby beat Leeds in the second leg of their play-off semi-final at Elland Road to advance to Wembley, Lampard led his team in a rendition of the revised song, complete with him holding binoculars up to his eyes.

This season, Leicester City won promotion to the Premier League automatically, and also had a laugh at Leeds’ expense. When Leicester lost 3-1 at Leeds in February the home fans delivered a full-blown rendition of I Predict a Riot by club favourites Kaiser Chiefs.

When Daniel Farke’s side lost 4-0 at Queens Park Rangers in May to hand promotion to Leicester, Jamie Vardy and the rest of the squad watching at home burst into their own rendition of the song. It was repeated when they celebrated winning the title in the dressing room at Preston North End too.

go-deeper

They also sang a far less confrontational song when they collected the trophy on the final day: When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You). The song was originally written in the 1920s, but Leicester fan and musician Jersey Budd covered it in 2010 to try to bring some luck to the end-of-season play-offs.

“It died a bit of a death because we didn’t go up,” as Budd puts it — but 12 years later, with Leicester at a higher level, the song resurfaced.

“The resurrection came when we played PSV in the quarter-finals of the Europa Conference League,” he says. After Leicester’s fans were kept back in the stadium following the 2-1 first-leg win in 2022, the Dutch club played it over the PA and one thing led to another. “The morning after the game, my phone was blowing up, with videos of the fans singing it,” says Budd.

The association went up a gear at home in the semi-final against Roma. “Before the game, I stood with my dad, my sister, my oldest daughter and my nephew and before kick-off they played it, the crowd sang and it was very emotional,” he says. “But we lost to Jose Mourinho’s Roma.”

The following season, it continued to be sung before games, and the players were all well aware of it. “I love that song that plays at kick-off, it’s brilliant when people are singing,” said James Maddison after Leicester beat local rivals Nottingham Forest 4-0.

But the season didn’t end well. “It was a disaster,” says Budd. “I thought they’d get rid of it.” But there was a happy ending and it was coupled with success again.

Perhaps the most incongruous post-match song belongs to MLS side Seattle Sounders. On first inspection, their choice of a bespoke rendition of the Christmas classic Jingle Bells seems like it wouldn’t stand the test of time, but there is a method behind their madness. It is only sung after away wins, hence the, ‘Oh what fun it is to see, Seattle win away’ as the only change to the chorus.

“You try to understand what they’re even saying first, right? And then you’re like, ‘Jingle bells? Really?’. I mean, it’s the middle of the summer. But it makes sense,” goalkeeper Stefan Frei explained in a club interview. “It’s catchy, it’s easy to follow even if English is not your first language. As the players bang their lockers to the rhythm, there is an important element to all dressing room singing. Leaving a mark.

“I want you guys to sing this loud, so they can hear it down there,” head coach Brian Schmetzer explained to his team last season in the dressing room before a rousing rendition.

“It’s a way to leave a gift to the loser team,” explains former striker Fredy Montero. “In MLS, 80 per cent of the locker rooms are next to each other. So the fact that after the game, we are celebrating singing jingle bells, the other team is always gonna remember that.”



Sumber

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR