Mauricio Pochettino — born in Argentina, lives in Spain, spent most of his career in England — was belting out John Denver lyrics on a California pitch last Wednesday. That alone tells you everything about what "Take Me Home, Country Roads" has become at this World Cup.
It started quietly. FIFA slipped the song onto its postgame playlist options looking to engineer a shared moment between the U.S. team and its supporters. It landed. Hard. The debut came after the U.S.'s 2-0 win over Australia in Seattle, and the footage of players wandering the pitch, waving to fans mid-chorus, went everywhere. Weston McKennie summed it up simply: "You could feel the connection with the fans."
The Bosnia-Herzegovina match brought the whole thing to another level. The U.S. won 2-0 despite playing down to ten men after a red card — and when the song hit, McKennie and Sebastian Berhalter were swinging their arms like they'd just won the whole tournament. Pochettino joined in. The crowd, tens of thousands of them, already knew every word.
A song that was never really about West Virginia
Here's the irony: "Country Roads" wasn't written about West Virginia, and wasn't written by someone who'd spent much time there. Cowriter Bill Danoff drew inspiration from a drive along Maryland's Clopper Road to a family reunion in Gaithersburg — 25 miles east of the West Virginia border. He and his then-wife Taffy Nivert were originally planning to sell it to Johnny Cash. Then John Denver heard an unfinished version in their apartment and convinced them otherwise. Released in 1971, it became Denver's defining song.
Denver died in a plane crash in 1997, but Danoff is still around to watch all this unfold. "I thought, 'Gee, I wish John was still here,'" he told the AP. "John got super excited about stuff like that, and it would have been fun to watch that game with him." The John Denver estate called the revival "thrilling," pointing out that the song's message — "Take me home to the place I belong" — lands regardless of geography. They're right. It does.
The song was already a sports institution
None of this came from nowhere. "Country Roads" has been closing out West Virginia University home victories for years. When the NFL took games to Germany starting in 2022, Munich crowds — already familiar with it from Oktoberfest — roared through it at NFL games. Manchester United supporters rewrote the lyrics around Old Trafford long before this tournament.
The World Cup stage is just bigger. And the U.S. team, which has sometimes struggled to generate genuine atmosphere around its national side, has stumbled into something that actually works. Whether it survives a deep tournament run or becomes a one-cycle novelty depends on results — the song barely registered after a last-minute loss to Turkey — but for now it's real.
England, meanwhile, have their own version of this: arms around shoulders, singing Oasis' "Wonderwall" after matches. Harry Kane called it "one of my favorite ever moments in an England shirt" after their opener against Croatia. Two very different anthems. Two teams that could yet meet in the knockout rounds. Someone's sing-along ends early.
