Hay que venir al sur is a column from the music journalist and Songmess podcast host Richard Villegas. Winking to the campy classic from the Italian disco diva Raffaella Carrà, the column is an invitation to explore the kaleidoscopic music scenes blossoming south of the border. In this issue, fútbol as an intersection of music, fashion, class solidarity, and history.
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I remember the day better than the game. It was sunny and hot—standard-issue Dominican summer—though it’s the greens and blues of the grass and sky that stick out vibrantly in my mind. We were over at my Tía Alicia’s house, who’d recently moved to the rural backwoods of the Caribbean to escape the suburban bore of Long Island, New York. Spoiler alert: She would not last. Regardless, excitement was in the air. It was the World Cup final, France vs. Brazil, the galvanized host nation hungry for their first trophy, facing off against a South American behemoth eager to assert global dominance with a fifth championship title. To this gang of Colombian immigrants, fútbol was religion, and on that Sunday we were very much at church.
It wasn’t until a few weeks ago when I wore a vintage France ’98 polo purchased in Montevideo that a fellow “kit head” reminded me of some notable moments from that particular tournament. The official mascot, Footix, was an ultra-cool rooster evocative of Woody Woodpecker and whom I desperately wished to befriend. It was also the year of the headbutt seen and memed around the world, when French captain Zinedine Zidane infamously attacked a rival player crown-first on the field, shortly before clinching the victory. I watched the match at eleven years old, so I’m not embarrassed to admit that the month-long intrigue around the World Cup evaporated from my mind as soon as it was over. But nearly three decades later, what endures clearly and just as enthrallingly is the eternal earworm of Ricky Martin’s “La copa de la vida.”
The official song of France ’98 is simply sensational, checking all the boxes of a crowd-pleasing anthem: from the rapturous batucada drums and chirping referee whistles of the track’s opening seconds to the effusive chants of “¡Ale, ale, ale!” intonable by sports fans of any language and creed. At the center, of course, was Ricky Martin, the hip-swiveling Puerto Rican star who split from the boy band Menudo in the late ’80s, breaking through in the following decade with the flamenco-inspired hit “María.” “La copa de la vida” is a spiritual successor to “María,” hitting many of the same percussive beats and call-and-response hooks, spruced up with ’90s house production and enough inspirational fizz to fuel an entire season of Glee. The song became such a ubiquitous smash that—after lukewarm and puzzlingly unathletic entries from Anastacia, Il Divo, and Toni Braxton—Shakira’s 2010 classic “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” reverted to the crucial equation of tongue-transcending choruses and booming percussion at the core of fútbol’s stadium-size euphoria.
Now, let’s keep it a buck: I refuse to call it “soccer” since that’s a term used almost exclusively in the United States. For a sport that is one of few universal global phenomena (even all-encompassing events like New Year’s celebrations and death are greeted differently across cultures), Americans have historically removed themselves from the kinship inspired by checkered balls. This self-inflicted outsider status has resulted in consistent mediocrity from the US men’s team, despite blockbuster budgets and celebrity drafting, and outrageous negligence towards the mighty national women’s team, whose four trophies cemented their legacy as the most successful in the female league’s history while earning nary a peep of homegrown fanfare. I understand that FIFA is an evil billion-dollar corporation intent on selling overpriced jerseys and converting a decimated Gaza Strip into a destination getaway, but hosting the 2026 World Cup across North America, and chiefly in the land of the allegedly free, is nothing short of baffling considering paltry domestic interest and consistent antagonism towards foreigners and non-English speakers.
And still, at the risk of sounding like a granola-fed hippie, I must insist that fútbol is about unity, even if warring factions frequently engage in fisticuffs on the stadium steps. At Argentina’s fabled La Bombonera, the towering blue-and-yellow home of Boca Juniors, the losing team’s “hinchas” are allowed to exit first in order to minimize taunts turning violent. The vicious chant “River, decime qué se siente” repurposes the melody of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s twanging “Bad Moon Rising” to eviscerate La 12’s eternal rival with boasts of past defeats. In fact, more uproarious appropriations are explored in Manuel Soriano’s 2020 tome, ¡Canten, putos!, where he investigates how hits from Bonnie Tyler, Erasure, and the Village People became weapons of fan destruction.
But regional beefs are put aside when your national flag floats onto the pitch of the world stage. In 2010, I arrived at my job at an English-teaching institute in Santiago de Chile only to discover that the entire country had shut down to watch a decisive qualifying match. We won—yes, we, because in for a penny, in for a pound—and thousands of revelers spilled into Plaza Baquedano to celebrate. I felt like Ferris Bueller, getting paid to skip class, gladly swept up in the jumping throngs passing around wine bottles while chanting Mala Junta’s patriotic ska banger “Blanco, rojo y azúl.”
Fútbol’s supreme popularity hinges on simple mechanics, the ingenuity to transform any patch of land into a playing field, and infectious fervor that can elevate the most disenfranchised into something larger than themselves. Though this feverish devotion is likened to the agony and ecstasy of faith, class struggle has proven a more potent catalyst for athletic salvation, with neighborhood teams and packed stands offering guidance, community, and even karmic restitution.
In 2024, I interviewed Chilean trap and reggaeton star Julianno Sosa, a high-profile acolyte of Santiago’s Colo-Colo FC who spoke candidly about the grim prospects of growing up on the peripheral mean streets of Puente Alto. Torn between a path of hustling or the one-in-a-million shot of becoming a fútbol star, he later achieved musical revelation while stuck in a New Jersey jail. Yerba Brava’s “La cumbia de los trapos” has a less aspirational outlook, touting the power of rags worn on your body or emblazoned with a team’s banner. The indelible cumbia villera is an anthem of working-class pride, accentuating how most fútbol fans around the world play on the same team against social inequality. My favorite visual representation of this divide lives in a Mexican gay-cowboy bar called Wateke, where a faded mural depicts the mascot of the Tigres UANL, a public university, mercilessly fucking a fan of Monterrey Rayados, the team at one of the country’s bougiest colleges.
However, the dream of ascendence is also what anoints fútbol stars into full-blown deities. Champions are avatars for a level of success the rest of us may never taste, but their start at the bottom of the totem pole makes their triumphs resonate like our own. This is almost to the letter the legend of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, aka Pelé, who after watching his father weep during the historic Maracanazo (where Brazil was defeated at home by Uruguay in the 1950 World Cup final) vowed to win a trophy just for him. Pelé made good on his promise eight years later, becoming the youngest player to debut at the World Cup, at seventeen years old, and leading his team to victory in two more such tournaments—a record that remains unmatched. His arc from kicking a cloth ball in the rural town of Três Corações, Minas Gerais, to sitting atop the pantheon of an entire sport is lovingly showcased in François Reichenbach’s 1977 documentary Pelé, narrated by the player himself and concluding with his professional retirement the same year. The film’s original soundtrack by bossa nova architect Sérgio Mendes provides exquisite accompaniment, perfectly encapsulating ambition and legacy on the understated “Meu mundo é uma bola,” or “My world is a ball.”
If Pelé’s fluid gameplay was poetry in motion, Diego Armando Maradona’s was brash and swaggering by comparison. Dieguito, El Diez, El Pibe de Oro, El Barrilete Cósmico, and a dozen more colorful nicknames roll off the tongue charged with the adoration of a people’s hero, marred by scandal but impossible to hate. In his 1995 book, El fútbol a sol y sombra, Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano describes the Argentine rebel as a generational talent tortured by the same fame that jettisoned him from poverty, and who “played better than anyone despite the cocaine rather than because of it.”
Maradona’s name is inextricable from controversy, whether thrown around as a synonym for boozing and womanizing or invoked during suspicious referee calls that harken to the “Hand of God” incident at the 1986 World Cup, when a ball bounced off his hand, scoring an illegal yet decisive goal against England. A lightning rod of such epic proportions has inspired countless songs, monuments, and living room effigies, serenaded by rock en español greats including Andrés Calamaro, Charly García, and Manu Chao, and aura-farmed by every self-proclaimed goated rapper under the sun.
As for the present day, Colombia’s new generation of “fifas”—a popular term for poking fun at fútbol-obsessed bros—is rekindling and reimagining cheeky salutes to the greats. Pop rock band Higuita en Chanclas derived their name during a brainstorming session, laughing as they tried to imagine the famously on-brand goalkeeper, René Higuita, in a relaxed, uniformless state. On “Me vuelvo del DIM,” mysterious plugg star Sa!koro attempts to win the affections of a paramour by offering to abandon his Bogotá fútbol club and switch allegiances to their mortal enemies in Medellín. Head and shoulders above the rest is La dosis máxima, a collaborative record from angsty troubadour Gato e’ Monte and the wild-hearted cumbia producer Felipe Orjuela, swirling with rancheras, merengue, and even punk, and stacked with stadium chants honoring legends from their beloved team, Millonarios. Though the pair found viral success with the cumbia llanera of “El poema de su greñero”—an ode to the unruly curls of player-turned-coach Alberto Gamero—the album’s emotional center beats with the murga of “Promesa de Monserrate,” narrating the meteoric rise of current league star Radamel Falcao.
Unlike most aspects of culture in the dystopian waste of 2026, digitalization hasn’t completely obliterated fútbol. Certainly, fewer young people are purchasing game-day tickets; while social media warped club loyalty into player-specific followings, meaning that when Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappé get drafted to a new team, so do their fans. But in our visually overstimulated zeitgeist, the aesthetics of fútbol are imbued with new significance as kitschy throwbacks, neighborhood-specific branding, and comfortable fashion statements with novel design.
Before ascending to global renown with a bonkers yet virtuoso Tiny Desk session on NPR, the irrepressible Argentine duo Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso made a splash with the 2019 electrap single “Ola mina xd,” a greenscreen-apalooza saturated with Boca Juniors memes and Simpsons bootlegs. On a more self-deprecating tip, Mexican electronic artist Trillones’s 2022 LP Música para estadios de tercera división refracts his trials of love and life through the underdog inconsequence of minor league fútbol. To accompany the cycle, he conceived a club called Atlético Depresión, releasing merch with an original crest emblazoned with a rain cloud and a half star to signify that they hadn’t won the championship, but gave it their best shot.
In fact, merchandising is how I found my way back to fútbol. Though I tune in only for the World Cup, every four years, jerseys have become the de facto souvenir from each new country I visit. As a forever hipster I favor unique drops, shoddy replicas, and kits from small regional teams rather than the hegemonic national shirt. While in Seoul, South Korea, I found an incredible collaboration between a local café called Nivelcrack and Mexico City’s Club América, the latest in a series with teams from Argentina and Brazil. In Ecuador, I won over the locals at a music conference by wearing the condor-embroidered jersey from their first showing at the World Cup, in 2002. It was an obvious fake, but universally lauded as an investment in the local economy rather than further lining FIFA’s pockets.
Chavmaxxing also has a fetishistic component, since Latin American gays are bullied by their school’s fútbol jocks, who in adulthood symbolize the toxic masculinity we often find so attractive. Cruising while clad in these idiosyncratic garments yields an impressive success rate, and I was tickled pink when for the 2022 World Cup bootleggers in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa sold printed jockstraps matching the uniforms of every major team. Before Heated Rivalry blasted athletic homoeroticism to the forefront of the cultural conversation, Intoxicado’s 2005 melancholy smash “Nunca quise” courted controversy with a video featuring rival players engaging in a passionate kiss after a nail-biting match. “To hate you have to love / to destroy you have to make,” the song philosophizes, contemplating the balance within chaos that sport encapsulates so well, and, for removed onlookers like myself, serving up a reminder that we’ve always been present, even when unseen.
Fútbol is everything. It’s a 1969, hundred-hour war between El Salvador and Honduras that erupted from a World Cup qualifying match and presaged Central America’s many armed conflicts of the coming decade. It’s the electronic producer Coghlan falling off scaffolding and breaking his foot while celebrating Argentina’s ascent to the 2022 final, returning to the streets hours later to revel from a wheelchair. It’s lying naked in bed with a hookup and learning about how Costa Rica’s first appearance on fútbol’s largest stage was immortalized in the film Italia 90. It’s one of the earliest memories with my dad, who was shocked to see Germany, a global powerhouse, get beat by the seemingly puny Bulgarian team at the 1994 Cup—likely the first time I became aware of international power dynamics. It’s the world in a ball, and I’m grateful to be part of it.
Richard Villegas is a music journalist, podcaster, and professional chismoso with bylines in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, and Remezcla. When not raging behind his desk in the Dominican Republic, you can find him traipsing through Latin America in search of fresh underground music and a cheap local beer.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
