Sorry, John Denver. Team USA Deserves a Better World Cup Victory Song. Here’s My Top 10.

Country Roads is a lovely song and a genuine phenomenon. It’s also a wistful lullaby doing a fireworks display’s job. As a public service, I made a better playlist.

The United States had just won only its second World Cup knockout match of the modern era. As the players saluted the crowd, 68,827 people in Santa Clara serenaded them with Take Me Home, Country Roads.

By now, this is the ritual. The song debuted in Seattle after the Australia win that clinched the knockouts, John Denver technically blaring on the loudspeakers but inaudible under 66,000 voices, Weston McKennie playing air guitar on the pitch. It repeated in Los Angeles as consolation after the meaningless Turkey loss.

The Bosnia win provided a genuinely moving moment. The clips go viral every time, and a 55-year-old folk song about West Virginia has re-entered YouTube's Top Songs chart as the unofficial anthem of the American World Cup. Watching coach Mauricio Pochettino, who self-described as "200% Argentinian" when asked if he felt American after the win, struggle with the West Virginia lyrics was equally sweet, hilarious, and a bit cringe. It is, by any measure, one of many feel-good stories of the tournament.

I should tell you where I am coming from before I ruin it. I can trace my entire soccer life to one missed handball call, June 21, 2002, when the United States outplayed Germany in a World Cup quarterfinal and Torsten Frings stopped a goal-bound ball on the line with his arm and no whistle came. Germany won 1-0 and I went down a rabbit hole from which I never emerged. That tournament turned a casual American sports fan into a USMNT diehard, then a Premier League obsessive, and eventually into a man with an Arsenal tattoo on his forearm, which is a strange journey for a kid from Hutchinson, Kansas, but here we are. The last three weeks, the Paraguay demolition, the Australia clincher, surviving Bosnia to reach the round of 16, have been the most fun I have had watching the U.S. men in twenty-four years.

Which is why I feel slightly guilty saying what I am about to say.

Country Roads is the wrong song.

I grew up with John Denver. He was a fixture of my childhood, on the radio every weekend courtesy of Casey Kasem, on every 1970s variety show my family watched, a gentle pop-folk presence as constant as the Kansas wind. Country Roads is a lovely song, a sincere homage to rural America, and coming from rural America myself, I get the charm completely. There is no irony in this paragraph. No hate for John Denver lives in this column.

Here is the reporting, and it is a fun little story. FIFA controls the presentation at every World Cup stadium, down to the sound system, and ahead of the tournament it asked federations to submit playlists for warmups, goals, and wins. U.S. Soccer came back with a list that included Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer, Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, and Country Roads. Sweet Caroline was already spoken for, claimed by England along with Wonderwall, because England contains multitudes. The key figure is Amy Hopfinger, who spent 18 years at U.S. Soccer and now serves as FIFA’s chief strategy officer. She told The Athletic that Country Roads was not among the players’ original picks. She added it herself after watching England fans serenade their team with Wonderwall on June 17, and two days later, with the U.S. up 2-0 on Australia at the final hydration break, she texted the World Cup’s head of production: this is the game, this is where we do this.

Here is my favorite detail. They played Livin’ on a Prayer first. It died in the Seattle air. Then the fingerpicked opening of Country Roads came over the speakers, the crowd drowned out John Denver, the players sang along, and a tradition was born on the spot. It has played after every U.S. match since. The Denver estate says it is thrilled.

I want to be precise about my complaint, because it is going to sound like a culture-war argument and it is anything but. My objection has nothing to do with politics or geography or whether a song about West Virginia can speak for Brooklyn. My objection is musical.

Ask yourself what emotion a victory song should create. Lift. Swagger. Release. The chemical surge of the final whistle. Joy that demands physical movement.

Now ask yourself what Country Roads creates. Longing. Nostalgia. Comfort. A warm ache for a place you left behind. It is a beautiful set of feelings, and they are the wrong feelings. Apart from the chorus, the song is contemplative, almost mournful. Who belts out Country Roads when they are hyped? It works as a lullaby you sing to a stadium, and there is real charm in that. It does not work as an eruption. And yes, the song’s defenders have receipts, from Vietnam vets who heard it on Armed Forces Radio to Germans who sing it at Oktoberfest. It is a great song. It is still the wrong song for this job.

I should note that I am on record as a huge believer in engineered musical moments. When the Democrats handed DJ Cassidy the state-by-state roll call at their 2024 convention, I walked in braced for cheese and walked out calling it the most entertaining thing I had ever seen at a political convention. Assigning songs to evoke emotion can absolutely work. My complaint here is with the selection, and the selection alone. Hopfinger built the moment brilliantly. She just reached for the wrong record.

If I were the Secretary of National Music, a cabinet position I am formally proposing (or maybe Chief National Aux Officer?), I would demand a song that meets six criteria. An instantly recognizable opening, two seconds or less. A chorus large enough to hold 70,000 voices. Impossible not to sing. Emotionally expansive rather than emotionally wistful. Unmistakably American. And it has to survive contact with 60,000 drunk people, which is the test that eliminates most of the American songbook.

Honorable Mentions: Frank Sinatra’s That’s Life has all the swagger in the world, but it’s a victory lap, not a victory anthem. You don’t sing it with 70,000 strangers so much as admire the coolest guy who ever lived. Ray Charles’ Hit the Road Jack opens with one of the most recognizable piano riffs in American music and practically invented joyful call-and-response, but the chorus is literally telling someone to leave, which is great for the losing fans and less ideal for your own celebration. Tom Petty’s American Girl has an opening riff that generates goodwill on contact and is pure momentum from there, but the problems are right in the title, which does not exactly track for the men’s team, and in the fact that its most famous cinematic placement is in Silence of the Lambs. And yes, I’m choosing Otis Day and the Knights’ version of Shout over the Isley Brothers because Animal House permanently rewired America’s brain. It starts like a party and ends in glorious chaos, but it takes too long to get there. A World Cup victory song has to explode the second it hits the speakers.

Now, the list.

10. Mr. Brightside, The Killers.
I do not personally care for this song, and any good DJ knows personal taste cannot get in the way of the room. This has become canon in anthemic stadium rock, a fixture at Michigan Stadium and, hilariously, the unofficial pub-closing anthem of the entire United Kingdom, where they scream it like they wrote it. They did not. An American band from Las Vegas wrote it. A home World Cup is precisely the moment to repatriate it.

9. Respect, Aretha Franklin.
This one writes itself. Two seconds to recognition, every American knows every word, and Aretha’s soaring vocals and sassy agency are as great a reflection of the American spirit as any song on this list. A woman took a man’s song, demanded her due, and made it the definitive version so completely that most people forget Otis Redding wrote it. That is the most American career move in the history of recorded music. And 70,000 people spelling R-E-S-P-E-C-T after a knockout-round win is an image this country deserves. Before anyone accuses this list of leaning Motown, by the way, this is an Atlantic record, cut with the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. Detroit does not get credit for everything.

8. Saturday in the Park, Chicago.
Consider the opening lyric: “Saturday in the park, I think it was the Fourth of July.” This song is a warm summer afternoon in an American city, set to horns, written by a band named after an American city, playing during a World Cup hosted in American cities during the summer America turns 250. The piano intro is instant sunshine, the horn section does the heavy lifting the way all great American horn sections do, and “can you dig it, yes I can” is a crowd response waiting for its crowd. It is less an explosion than a glow, which costs it a few spots on this list, but no song here better captures what this tournament has actually felt like: people who cannot believe how much fun they are having in public.

7. Sabotage, Beastie Boys.
Recognizable in under one second, unhinged in the best way, and gloriously New York. This is canon for Gen X cool dudes, from the seminal artists who opened up hip hop to white dudes and somehow got cooler for it instead of less. If I am being honest, I would prefer Shake Your Rump off Paul’s Boutique, but that is me, and this list is about what works, and Sabotage works. The crowd cannot sing a single word of it, which should be disqualifying, but nobody sings Sabotage anyway. You detonate it and let the stadium shake.

6. Scenario, A Tribe Called Quest.
Full disclosure, an early draft of this list had Jump Around here, and it works. I made the case for it when the DNC played it for Wisconsin in 2024, and Camp Randall Stadium proves it every Saturday. But it is a little obvious, a little on the nose. Scenario is not terribly well known outside people who wore out The Low End Theory, and I do not care, because the intro and that opening, HERE WE GO YO, HERE WE GO YO, is fucking great, and I am honestly getting a little choked up imagining how it would play as a stadium erupts. Also it contains a young Busta Rhymes detonating like a dungeon dragon, which is its own argument. Old dude who loves early 90s hip hop gonna old dude who loves early 90s hip hop. Don’t like it? Write your own list.

5. Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.
An elite song, carried by perhaps the greatest James Jamerson bassline ever recorded, which is like saying the best Picasso. And Marvin’s improvised “whoo!” at the start of the last chorus is one of the great moments in the history of American pop music and needs its own acknowledgment here, because it is fucking great. If you are not familiar with it, go listen to it now. I command you. The duet structure is untested at stadium scale, and I choose to see that as a feature. Let the crowd take Tammi’s part.

4. Dancing in the Street, Martha and the Vandellas.
Here is the one that should keep Amy Hopfinger up at night, because it was practically written for this tournament. The horn blast opening is a starter’s pistol. The chorus is four syllables and drunk-proof. And the lyric is a literal roll call of American cities, Chicago, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, down to “can’t forget the Motor City.” A World Cup hosted across American cities had a sixty-year-old Motown record, co-written by Marvin Gaye, inviting the whole world to dance in the streets of those exact cities. The song was sitting right there.

3. Don’t You Worry ‘Bout a Thing, Stevie Wonder.
I can report from decades of personal field research that this song has never once failed to move a room. And the chorus is the perfect sing-along for one glorious reason: there are no words. It is all “bah bah bah bah” and “do do do do,” which means a stadium of 70,000 strangers who have never heard the song can join it, at full voice, on the first pass. No lyric sheet required, no West Virginia geography quiz. The joy of the song is infectious, it is just obscure enough that playing it feels like a discovery rather than an obligation, and the message is perfect for the end of a match or really any environment. Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing. Don’t sweat the small stuff, and it’s all small stuff. Stevie Wonder wrote a fucking zen koan you shake your booty to.

2. Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen.
No, not Born in the U.S.A. We have all had that conversation already.

The opening of Born to Run is American secular scripture, that piano and glockenspiel wall announcing that something enormous is coming. The song is four and a half minutes of pure escalation, and it is about the thing Country Roads is precisely not about. Denver’s song longs for home. Springsteen’s song is about motion, restlessness, the road out, the conviction that the next place will be better if you can just get there fast enough. That is the actual American character. We are a nation of people who left. And for a team that spent decades as a global punchline and is now sprinting through its home tournament, “tramps like us, baby, we were born to run” is a hell of a chorus. So why is it sitting at number two? Because the verses arrive at a dead sprint, a wall of words no crowd of 70,000 can hold together, and a victory song has to belong to the crowd. Bruce wrote the great American song. He did not write the great American sing-along.

1. Shining Star, Earth, Wind & Fire.
The opening of this song is a fuse that burns for exactly eleven seconds before the horns detonate and Maurice White shouts “Yeah!” and every human within earshot becomes ten percent happier. I have never once seen this song fail. Not at a wedding, not at a cookout, not in a car, and it would not fail in a World Cup stadium either. A scout breaking down this song’s tape would find no weaknesses. Elite opening. Elite horns. A groove that makes movement involuntary. And a chorus simple enough for 70,000 strangers to carry together, delivering a message that is frankly better American civics than most of what passed for it this year: you are a shining star, no matter who you are. If you have not watched Questlove’s Earth, Wind & Fire documentary on HBO, fix that this weekend, and then tell me this is not the sound of America winning.

* * * * *

I have no illusion that America is switching songs because one columnist spent too much time thinking about stadium playlists. Country Roads has won. The tradition is set, the estate is thrilled, and if the U.S. beats Belgium, I will be singing it too, wistfully, at a moderate tempo, like everyone else.

But every time that gentle fingerpicked intro starts after another American victory, some part of me will hear Bruce counting us in, or better yet those eleven seconds of Earth, Wind & Fire horns, and wonder what might have been. Take me home, sure. But first, Maurice, hit it.