Vamos! Why do so many footballers shout in Spanish?

England 4-2 Croatia. A French referee, one German manager, and a collection of 22 players representing their countries, only two of whom have played their football on Spanish soil before.  

Probably not the game in which you would expect to hear a cry of, ‘Vamos!‘ — best translated as “let’s go!” or “come on!” —  from the pitch.

But that is exactly what Noni Madueke exclaimed after he twisted away from Josko Gvardiol and scuffed a cross-shot into the outstretched boot of Mario Pasalic at the near post, gesturing to the English supporters behind the goal to crank up the volume after another foray into the box.

It felt a strange reaction at the time. Madueke was born to Nigerian parents in Barnet, north London, and has played for four clubs in the English capital either side of a five-year spell at PSV in the Netherlands. 

But there are a number of reasons, not least the eclectic mix of team-mates and managers with whom Madueke has shared a dressing room over the years, that meant it might have become the first word to spring to mind.

One could be Jude Bellingham, the England midfielder who has played for Real Madrid since 2023. In an interview with ITV, three months after he signed, Bellingham was asked why he had shouted, ‘Vamos!’ in a game against Scotland.

“It’s tough when I’m trying to remind myself so constantly in Spain to use it, especially on the pitch when my team-mates might need it,” he said. “Then I come away with the (England) boys and I’m still using it and they’re almost looking at me like, ‘What are you on about?’”

Either way, the fact that most English spectators were able to quickly understand Madueke’s shout as a Spanish rally cry, and the fact it was lip-read so easily on the replay, helps to illustrate the rising popularity of ‘vamos’. The reasons why, however, need more careful unpicking.

---

Dr Txuss Martin, an affiliated lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge, has a number of theories. His first, on the cultural significance of Hispanic football, goes a long way to explaining how ‘vamos’ first appeared on our TV screens.

“My initial instinct is that its success is in part a consequence of the popularity of La Liga or Spanish-speaking stars such as Lionel Messi,” he says. “One could argue more broadly that modern football has acquired a certain Hispanic accent, owing to the influence of Spanish and Latin American players, coaches, clubs and fans, so within that context, it has become highly recognisable.”

The influence of La Liga throughout the late 2000s from a linguistic sense has been tangible. At the height of Messi’s era-defining rivalry with Cristiano Ronaldo, as the great Barcelona team of Pep Guardiola clashed with Jose Mourinho’s Real Madrid, Spanish football was a global spectacle that helped to add new vocabulary, and more of a hispanic flavour, to the football vernacular.

El Clasico saw tiki-taka go head-to-head with the galacticos, while the rolled R’s, crisp vowels and palatal sounds of Spanish names — from Raul to David Villa — spilled into British living rooms. Frantic, theatrical commentary, inspired by early Latin American radio broadcasters, provided iconic phrases: ‘Encara Messi’, ‘Golazo’ and gloriously prolonged shouts of,’ ‘Gooooool’ that found their way into kickabouts on the street.

“Certain languages become closely associated with particular cultural domains,” says Martin. “Think about Italian in classical music, you have ‘staccato’, ‘crescendo’, ‘allegro’. French cuisine has given us ‘chef’, ‘souffle’, ‘a la carte’, and so on. Many of the words used within those domains then travel far beyond their original speech communities, and I suppose football has done that for Spanish.”

Particularly for the younger generation of fans, and indeed players, exposure to Spanish expression in football means we tend to use such phrasing in our own experience of the sport.

Martin names another cultural sporting phenomenon, with more of a focus on the word ‘vamos’ itself: Rafael Nadal.

Between his first Grand Slam title in 2005 and his 22nd in 2022, Nadal spent a cumulative four years as World No 1, capturing the imagination with his endless intensity and competitiveness. Most marathon rallies, especially those that ended with a dramatic point, would end with a distinctive cry.

“Along with his lasso-like forehand and sleeveless tops, one of Nadal’s trademarks throughout his career was the ‘vamos’ he would let out after a big point,” says The Athletic’s senior tennis writer Charlie Eccleshare. “It was often coupled with a fist pump, and became synonymous with his expressive, passionate on-court demeanour and refusal to give in.”

Of course, reaching for ‘vamos’ was instinctive for the Spanish-speaking Nadal, as it is for his compatriot Carlos Alcaraz today. But much in the way that younger people will look to imitate their sporting heroes — sticking out their tongue while driving to the basket like Michael Jordan, standing over free-kicks like Ronaldo — a number of modern tennis players have added ‘vamos’ to their reserve.

Britain’s Cameron Norrie suggests it comes from his Argentine coach, while Dominic Thiem combined it with an Austrian slang term, ‘Bam oida’, to form ‘bamos’, close to how the Spanish would pronounce the word. It is just one part of Nadal’s wide-reaching legacy that “come on” is no longer the go-to phrase.

“There had been many successful Spanish players before him,” says Eccleshare. “But none were as outwardly emotional as Nadal, and for that reason he can be considered patient zero in the ‘vamos’ sporting epidemic we now see.”

---

In addition to its cultural and historical importance, there is a simpler idea; that ‘vamos’ is just a really satisfying word to say.

Martin is keen to stress that we should not attribute too much to phonetics alone, and suggests its popularity comes down to a “mixture of historical, phonetic, semantic, and pragmatic factors”, but provides an explanation as to why it works so well as a way of injecting energy and adrenaline into key moments of a game.

“It is an effective word for crowd participation,” he says. “The sequence is highly sonorous and easy to project. Crucially, either of the two vowels can be prolonged for several seconds: ‘vamooooos!’ That makes it particularly well suited to chants, celebrations and collective displays of enthusiasm.”

“Many successful chants seem to combine a clear onset with a sonorous segment that can be sustained by a crowd. Think of the famous ‘Marchons, Marchons!’ in La Marseillaise, where part of the emotional force comes from turning the word into a prolonged ‘Marchooooons!’”

In addition, the starting sound helps to give it a percussive quality. As Spanish evolved from Latin, speakers stopped making a physical distinction between v — a “fricative” sound formed by pushing air through the teeth and the bottom lip  — and b, a “plosive”, for which both lips are used. It means that in Modern Spanish, both letters are pronounced as variants of the same sound, much closer to an English b than an English v.

“The word begins with what we call a voiced stop, where we block the airflow with our mouths while our vocal cords vibrate,” Martin adds. “That builds pressure, which bursts as we open for the next vowel — a plosive sound, which gives it a clear and energetic onset and makes it effective for exclamations.”

Literally, ‘vamos’ is the first person plural form of the verb “to go” in the present tense — “we go”. But as Martin explains, its meaning has shifted away from that purely grammatical function.

“Semantically, ‘vamos’ has gradually become a broader expression of collective energy: something between ‘come on’, ‘let’s go’, ‘keep going’, and ‘we’ve got this’.

“What makes ‘vamos’ especially interesting is that it’s not really directed at somebody else. It creates a group that includes both speaker and audience and of which the speaker is simultaneously a part. In that sense, it creates a feeling of shared participation rather than simply encouraging somebody else to do something. That sense of collective is particularly important for sporting audiences.”

Though such nuance may not be understood by foreign language speakers, the body language that will often accompany a cry of ‘vamos’ helps to convey its intensity.

“Many fans who use it today understand perfectly when to use it without necessarily speaking Spanish,” Martin says. “Everything we’ve spoken about, its cultural significance, the richness of its meaning, its sound, has helped it to arguably become part of the international vocabulary of football.”