theathleticuk
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.
Advertisement 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, Baseballs 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! #WorldCup pic.twitter.com/Zec3aNsYsx MLB (@MLB) July 2, 2026 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 didnt have an answer, so I went looking for people who might.
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? Advertisement Tom Clark, a British sociologist, spent the 200203 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 Im Scunthorpe til I die.
(He and Edward Mainwaring wrote another: Were st 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.
Theres 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 doesnt always work.
At lower-league games, hes watched chants die on the spot, and everyone takes the p*** out of them.
What decides it is often the game itself.
If theres an exciting period of play someone has a shot, it nearly goes in thats an elevated sense of emotion, and theres much more chance of everyone joining in.
A dull match, on the other hand, is when the crowd turns to banter instead, because theres 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.
Thats 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.
Advertisement When I sent him the Harris clip, he loved it.
That group likely knew very little about Harris, he said.
But they didnt 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.
Its his fault, essentially.
Its tough for a song to happen spontaneously, he said.
Because they have to time it when the D.J.
isnt 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.
Theyre meant to be dynamic.
Theyre 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 dont 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.
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.
Advertisement 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 via a QR code, so fans who are there for the first time can find them.
As far as Americans and how we consume things, we need something ready-made, she says.
Then she described the experience at Atlantas 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 Americas 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.
Atlantas supporters also coordinate directly with the front office.
The club tells them if it doesnt 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.
Weve all seen reels of English fans who are making fun of a players haircut or their own teams not even scoring a goal, so theres 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 theyve borrowed, Atlanta United fans have built something else.
Advertisement 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 Palaces 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 thats happening now.
And theyre using the resources they have.
Chants are secular hymns, he said, and you cant argue with a hymn; you sing it, or you dont.
Hes watched racist chants die in the air, summoned to taunt some player and then starved because the people nearby wouldnt 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 Madrids 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.
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 USMNTs 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.
Advertisement Much like the English chants described by Grant, it transitioned organically between crowds, just over a much longer period of time.
And its 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.
Thats where the tradition runs the deepest.
(Songs) that have their roots, theyre 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 isnt 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.