Update: Why do Manchester United play ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ before home games? News

The John Denver track is played before every Man United game at Old Trafford, but how did the idea come about?

‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ by John Denver has become an Old Trafford anthem, with the song played before every Manchester United home game. But why?

The track has been a United anthem for many years, with fans tweaking the lyrics to: “Take me home, United Road, to the place I belong. To Old Trafford, to see United, take me home, United Road!”

United captain Bruno Fernandes recently sat down with the club’s in-house media team to discuss how the idea to play the song ahead of kick-off at Old Trafford came about.

“It’s a song that everyone knows in the dressing room and so it’s a popular song for us in the dressing room,” he told MUTV. “The understanding we have from the outside was it was one of the most popular songs for the club, the lyrics ‘at home’ works well so putting everything together we thought it would be a good thing.

“Obviously, we don’t want to make it something that other teams do it, we spoke with certain players and we said ‘What do you think about this? Would it give you a push and lift you a bit? What are your thoughts?’

“As I said, in Portugal it’s very natural that everyone has their own song, we call it an anthem. Everyone puts the song on before the game starts and when the referee whistles they put the song down and the fans carry on singing.

“It’s a moment when every fan lifts up, everyone in the stadium feels that song very much, it’s a song that resembles the United history also, so it was a little bit of a mix of things that we thought it would be a good thing.”

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