Music at Sporting Events

How do you fire up an unenthusiastic home crowd or engage an already excited one into even higher emotional investment? How do you taunt the opposition or cheer on your own team? Add music and cue The Power of Rock!

This is a trope that is Older Than You Think, as a sufficiently profound musical instrument (say, a vuvuzela an organ) carries farther than the human voice alone. Some songs have been so ingrained into certain sports that it becomes a Crowd Song or Call-and-Response Song.

Examples of Music at Sporting Events include:

Anime and Manga

• Ciel in Kuroshitsuji arranges a student orchestra to play at a cricket game, ostensibly to cheer up his team but really to use the beats to signal when to swing the bat. The opposing team figures this out after a while, but not before the Blue House team has scored a good amount of points.

Film

• A Knight's Tale infamously uses several anachronistic Crowd Songs (including Queen's "We Will Rock You") at the jousting tournaments.
• Drumline
• Major League: Rick "Wild Thing" Vaughn, former starting pitcher relegated to relief, comes to the mound with "Wild Thing" playing on the PA, which becomes a Crowd Song. This inspired MLB to do it (per Arvine's Real Life example).
• Robin Hood: Men in Tights: The archery contest is presented as a sporting event, with the crowd at least doing the tomahawk chop.
• Slap Shot: "Don't ever play 'Lady of Spain' again!"
• The Replacements: Since the kicker used to play soccer, the crowd sings "Olé" whenever he comes up to kick.

Live Action Television

• How I Met Your Mother - Robin's ex best friend is the organist for a hockey team.

Music Videos

• In Taylor Swift's video for "You Belong With Me", the Hollywood Nerd plays in the school marching band and can be seen playing music (or at least cheering) from the stands.

Professional Wrestling

• When has a wrestler not come out into the ring to his own theme song?
  • Gorgeous George more or less started that in the 1940s ("Pomp and Circumstance").

Western Animation

• Family Guy: While auditioning for the church organist position, one of the potentials plays a tune more appropriate for a sporting event instead.
• On The Simpsons, the church organist is also the organist for the local minor-league baseball club.

Real Life

• Pretty much every American sporting event ever. In college and high school, adding thematically appropriate music is the marching band's job while they're in the stands and in some circles considered Serious Business; in pro-sports, music is either played by an organist or broadcast by a DJ.
  • Most schools have a fight song and an Alma Mater (sung either before the halftime break or at the end of the game).
    • Many schools will play their fight song in response to scoring a touchdown, or sometimes even a field goal.
    • Halftime shows in general, and for college and professional football in particular.
  • Many of the older NFL teams also have official fight songs.
  • Baseball's two most famous are the "Charge" fanfare and "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" sung during the Seventh Inning Stretch.
    • Individual players sometimes even have theme music that's played when they come out. For examples, reliever Trevor Hoffman enters the field to the sound of ACDC's "Hell's Bells".
  • The Kentucky Derby's famous opening trumpet riff.
  • "The Star Spangled Banner" is sung at the start of most pro sport events in the United States, though occasionally they might substitute "America the Beautiful" or "God Bless America" instead.
    • Don't forget that if one of the teams is Canadian—possible in the NHL, NBA, and American League—they'll play "O Canada" as well.
• There's a whole list of them which are often used in association football, but among the most famous is the "Olé" song. British football in particular has a variety of songs, one of the best known of which consists of chanting 'one-nil, one-nil' repeatedly when the appropriate result is in the team's favour.
  • Football World Cup matches and friendlies have national anthems of the teams before kickoff.
  • National football matches often include songs as well. Liverpool's You'll Never Walk Alone is one of the most famous.
• It's traditional in international rugby to sing the national anthems before the game as well.
• Formula One uses the anthem of both the winning driver and the winning constructor — leading to interesting segues, or extended play if both are the same nationality.
• International games also have the tradition of playing the national anthem of the winning team. The Summer and Winter Olympics both do it, as do the Commonwealth Games. The Commonwealth Games is particular fun as the UK enters as its constituent parts. Since these parts haven't been independent for centuries the National Anthem is often whatever the competitor say it is. The England 2010 team, for example, had a vote to decide what the English National Anthem would be for the games ("Jerusalem" won).
• Every Australian Rules Football team has a theme song. In the AFL, it's played when the teams enter, and the winning team's song is played at the end of the game. At every level from the AFL down to grass-roots football, the winning team sings it in the rooms after the game.
• Pro darts players usually come out to their own theme song, often one which ties in with their stage name.
• In the last few years at Test matches involving England, "Jerusalem" has been played at the start of the day's play. And then there's all the compositions produced by the Barmy Army...