The Super Bowl Shuffle - Precedents

Precedents

The 1985 Bears were not the first pro football team with a group song. The 1984 San Francisco 49ers put out a record during that season, one in which they also went on to become Super Bowl champs. The song, "We Are the 49ers," was in the vein of post-disco/80's dance-pop music. Later in the 1980s, the 49ers would put out another team song titled "49ers Rap." Neither of these songs, however, became a hit on the scale of the "Super Bowl Shuffle".

• The 1977 Denver Broncos running back, Jon Keyworth sang "Make Those Miracles Happen" by L. Meeks and M. Weyand. However, the Broncos did not win the 1978 Super Bowl.

• The Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional baseball team (1869–1870), sang a song to the spectators prior to some of their games: "We are a band of baseball players / From Cincinnati city..." -But no recording was ever made or distributed by a record label.
• Some English soccer teams celebrated qualifying for the FA Cup Final each year by recording a song for the occasion. The 'cup final record' as it was known, became as tradition with many of the songs being top ten successes in the UK music charts. The songs were occasionally original recordings but more often reworkings of recent chart successes with lyrics edited for the occasion. They often included the original artist singing along, especially when they are a fan of the team involved. The Liverpool Football Club's "Anfield Rap", for the 1988 final, was broadcasted on the Rick Dees US weekly top forty program, which at the time always played the top three successes in the UK during the show. During the days that followed many US radio stations were bemused by requests for the soccer song from England, as it was most commonly known. By the mid-1990s the tradition had begun to end, though it remains common for some qualifying nations for the FIFA World Cup to still release songs to mark the occasion.