‘Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)’, the song by Colombian singer Shakira for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa has been picked as the all-time best World Cup song.
SeatPick, the largest ticket search engine and ticket marketplace for live events, compiled the ‘catchiest football songs according to science’ list and Shakira’s trilingual ‘Waka Waka’ took the top spot.
To find which, of the many, football-inspired pop songs continue to be memorable and catchy, SeatPick employed four metrics together with factors such as popularity on Spotify and number of views on YouTube to come up with an overall score.
The four musical metrics are danceability (how good a song is to dance to), energy (how energetic the song feels based on speed and volume), speechiness (how many spoken/sung/rapped words are in a song), and valence (how positive/happy a song feels).
Commenting on ‘Waka Waka’, SeatPick said: “In terms of overall popularity, it blows all the other songs out of the water. It has over three billion views on YouTube alone. It also scores high in certain criteria like danceability (7.6/10), energy (8.7/10), and valence (7.4/10). Its speechiness score (8.42/10) is helping its popularity—there are fewer words to learn so anyone can sing along! All of this results in ‘Waka Waka’ winning first place with 8.35/10.”
‘Hayya Hayya’, despite being released this year for the ongoing World Cup in Qatar, is second on the list. SeatPick gave it an overall score of 6.9/10, scoring 7.3/10, 8.3/10, 6.2/10, and 2.6/10 in danceability, energy, valence and speechiness, respectively. Though the song has already garnered 42 million YouTube views after just seven months, it is less popular on Spotify, scoring just 20/100.
The official song for the 1998 FIFA World Cup, ‘La Copa de la Vida’ by Ricky Martin, emerged third on the list with an overall score of 6.53/10. SeatPick said the song, which has a relatively low 77 million views on YouTube, scored 11 in popularity; 6.6/10 in valence; 7.1/10 in danceability; 9.1/10 in energy; and 4.2/10 in speechiness.
Pitbull’s ‘We Are One (Ole Ola)’ featuring Jennifer Lopez and Claudia Leitte, FIFA’s official song in 2014, is fourth on the list with a score of 6.3/10 as the song has 862 million views on YouTube.
K’Naan’s ‘Wavin’ Flag’, Coca-Cola’s promotional anthem for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, according to SeatPick’s metrics, sits at the fifth position, having an overall score of 6.2/10 with 400 million views on YouTube.
