It’s FIFA season and the world is picking anthems again. Future and Tyla represented America this year. Shakira’s Waka Waka shook the world in 2010. Every World Cup cycle brings a new song, a new campaign, a new attempt to bottle the feeling of the entire planet watching the same game at the same time.
But there’s one song that stands over everything. One song that can probably never be overtaken.
The Boy, the War, and the Poem
It’s 1991. Somalia is falling apart. A civil war erupts and a 13-year-old boy named Keinan Abdi Warsame, K’Naan, is woken up by gunfire. Chaos everywhere. It lasts for days, then weeks, then months. Friends he grew up with are killed in the crossfire. His neighborhood, his city, his entire world collapses into violence.
K’Naan’s grandfather was Haji Mohammad, one of Somalia’s most celebrated poets. A man who, according to K’Naan, could stop people fighting with a poem. And to comfort a terrified boy in the middle of a civil war, he wrote him a few lines.
“When I get older, I will be stronger. They’ll call me freedom, just like a waving flag.”
Those words stayed with K’Naan. Through the war. Through his mother’s impossible decision to take her children and flee. Through New York, where the skyscrapers were as terrifying as the gunfire had been. Through Toronto, where he arrived as a refugee who didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the culture, and got bullied for being different. Through all of it, his grandfather’s poem was the thing he held onto.
K’Naan’s name means “traveler” in Somali. His grandfather gave him the words. The world gave him a stage. And the song he built from those words became the most unifying anthem football has ever known.
Why This Song Can’t Be Beaten
The original version of Wavin’ Flag was about poverty, freedom, and war. It was a protest song. It was personal. Then Coca-Cola approached K’Naan for the 2010 FIFA World Cup and asked him to make it happier, more celebratory, more universal. He agreed. And somehow, the happier version didn’t lose the weight. It just made the weight accessible to everyone. The Original:
The Coca-Cola Version:
The production leaves space to sing together. Big chorus. Simple melody. Repeating phrases. You don’t need to speak perfect English to join in. That matters more than people realize. Football is the world’s sport. The anthem has to work in every language, every country, every stadium. Wavin’ Flag works because a child can sing it. A stadium of 80,000 can sing it. A billion people watching on screens across the planet can sing it. The melody is so open that it belongs to whoever is singing it at that moment.
And there’s no enemy in the song. That’s the key. Many anthems, many national songs, many sports songs are built around identity against someone else. Us vs them. Our country vs yours. Wavin’ Flag isn’t. Its emotional center is simply: we’re here together. That changes how people receive it. It’s not about winning. It’s about being present. Being alive. Being free.
South Africa Changed Everything
The 2010 World Cup wasn’t just a tournament. It was the first World Cup on the African continent. That meant something that went beyond football.
Africa hosting the world. New countries feeling represented on the global stage. Billions of people hearing African sounds, seeing African cities, watching African culture broadcast to every corner of the planet. The tournament carried a sense of arrival. A continent that had been reduced to stereotypes of poverty and conflict was showing the world something else.
And the anthem for that moment was written by a Somali refugee. A boy who fled a civil war, traveled through two countries, and turned his grandfather’s poem into a song that the entire planet sang together. That’s not a marketing campaign. That’s the kind of story that only happens when the timing, the place, and the art align perfectly.
Wavin’ Flag hit number one in 19 countries. There are 22 versions of the song in different languages. It became bigger than football. It became the sound of a moment where the world felt, for a few weeks, like it was actually one place.
A Grandfather’s Poem
Every World Cup will have a new anthem. New artists. New campaigns. New attempts to capture that feeling. Some of them will be good. None of them will be this.
Because you can manufacture a hit song. You can’t manufacture the story behind Wavin’ Flag. A poet in Somalia writing lines to comfort his grandson during a civil war. That grandson carrying those lines across continents, through refugee camps, through snow he’d never seen, through a language he didn’t speak. And then, decades later, standing on a stage in South Africa while the entire world sings his grandfather’s words back to him.
When I get older, I will be stronger. They’ll call me freedom, just like a waving flag.
That’s not an anthem. That’s a promise a grandfather made to a scared boy. And the whole world kept it.