GTA VI, the Radio Wave, and a Lesson in the Sound of Football Terraces

On a Thursday afternoon I was standing in the corridor that leads to the technical area of a small stadium in east London, waiting for a pre-match press conference. The corridor was narrow, smelling of artificial turf and boot polish, and the public-address speaker above my head was playing a playlist nobody would remember. Then my phone buzzed. On the screen was a line from The Express Tribune: the in-game radio stations of GTA VI will feature Lana Del Rey, Bad Bunny and Robyn.

I read it a second time, then a third. No player names. No scoreline, no transfer, no table. A pure music story inside a video game. I should have put the phone away and gone back to work. Instead I stood still, for a very personal reason: in fifteen years on the job, no item so far removed from football had ever made me think this hard about the terraces.

The speaker kept playing. One more song, then another, unheard, unremembered. And I asked myself: when was the last time a stadium made me remember a specific sound, rather than a goal.

Let me be clear from the start: this story sits outside the pitch. GTA VI is the next title from Rockstar Games, and the report concerns the soundtrack of its radio stations. The Express Tribune cites the original information from Rockstar Games and a secondary source, Pitchfork; the date mentioned is November 19, 2026. The three names Lana Del Rey, Bad Bunny and Robyn belong to music, not to football.

I am writing about it for a different reason. For more than two decades, the Grand Theft Auto series has turned the in-car radio into something bigger than a playlist. It is world-building through sound: the player drives through a fictional city, presses a button to change station, and a sense of place, class and era pours in through the ears before the eyes. Radio in GTA was never background music. It is a character.

That made me think about football. Football once had something similar: a form of sound that built a world of its own, with no images, no goals, no scoreboard. We call it many things — singing on the terraces, the murmur before kick-off, the sigh after the final whistle. Whatever the name, it is a living radio station, broadcasting every week, needing no licensing contract.

The problem lies elsewhere. While Rockstar spends years choosing each track for a fictional city, many real stadiums are playing identical playlists. The same walk-out track, the same old pop song, the same drum loop before the home team emerges. That repetition is not a small matter. It is the sign of something neglected: acoustic identity.

I am not arguing that clubs need to hire composers. I am asking a simpler question: who is choosing the sound of your stadium, and on what criteria. At most professional clubs, the answer is a media officer, a phone playlist, and a very large pressure called safety. Nobody wants to take a risk. And that collective safety has produced a uniform sound, where one club's home ground does not sound different from another's.

In the summer of 2026, football has an enormous stage: a World Cup across three North American countries. In the winter of the same year, Rockstar has scheduled GTA VI for November 19. The two events do not compete directly, but they share the scarcest resource of all: the attention of young people.

Based on my experience of following matches, I have come to think that most of the debate about young audiences asks the wrong question. People ask how to keep a twenty-year-old fan. The better question is: what is that twenty-year-old giving their time to, and what feeling does it give them that football no longer does.

One number is worth considering. Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2026, has sold more than 185 million copies as of 2026, according to figures published by Take-Two Interactive. It is one of the best-selling entertainment products in history, and it achieved that without a season. It only needed a world convincing enough that people wanted to return.

Football has the opposite advantage: a real world, a fixed calendar, a community bound across generations. But that advantage is being worn down by a product approach that increasingly resembles television: chopped into highlights, optimised for phones, and gradually stripping out the very thing that creates its primal pull — atmosphere.

What is being lost is not the audience but the atmosphere. And atmosphere, in football, always begins with sound.

Think about how we consume a match today. Most young viewers watch on a phone, with a commentator talking continuously, the crowd compressed into a blurred layer, every moment clipped into a short segment. The final product is highly efficient in information and very poor in feeling.

Now recall how Rockstar builds a radio station. No host explains to you that this city is dangerous or that this district is wealthy. You listen, you feel, you assemble it yourself. Sound does the storytelling work that dialogue would otherwise do. That is an entirely different production philosophy, and its method is worth learning from.

I once stood on the terrace of an old London ground on a winter afternoon, when the home side went behind before half-time. Nobody spoke. Then in the sixtieth minute, one corner of the stand began to sing, and the whole ground followed. That is the moment I remember most from that season, and it appeared in no highlight package. No goal, no turning point, nothing to cut into a clip.

The rhythm of a match can only be heard when you put your ear to the grass. That is why I started taking notes on sound rather than only on events. A separate notebook for studs on the corridor floor, for the whistle, for the silence before a penalty. Those things never reach a spreadsheet, but they are why people come back the following week.

Now to money, because this is where football and gaming meet most clearly. Music in games is not free. Every track in a major title is a licensing contract, usually negotiated separately, and the total cost of a serious soundtrack can reach tens of millions of dollars. Rockstar is famous for spending heavily here, because they understand that music is part of the product's value, not an ancillary cost.

Football also has a music economy, but much of it sits outside the frame. League anthems, traditional songs, chants written by supporters themselves — the things that create collective identity are usually the least invested in. Clubs spend hundreds of millions on players and close to nothing on the sound that shapes the emotions of tens of thousands of people every week.

In football, the most important investments are often the ones that never appear on the transfer ledger.

This leads to an observation about the market I have followed for years. Signing fees for free agents are more corrosive than transfer fees, because they bypass the core scrutiny of financial regulation. A transfer leaves a trace in the accounts and in public view; a fee paid to an agent does not. The invisible is always more dangerous than the visible, in football as in culture.

The same logic applies to terrace sound. The thing that shapes a supporter's experience most is the thing least measured. Nobody puts the singing of one corner into an annual report. Nobody can price the moment a whole ground falls silent before a penalty. And precisely because it cannot be measured, it is underrated.

The loudest applause does not come from the stands, but from the empty seats. I learned that during the months when stadiums closed because of the pandemic, when the Premier League and Championship were suspended for nearly three months. Back then I was following Brentford FC, and the atmosphere around the club fell into silence.

With no matches and no transfer news, I volunteered to organise an online forum for more than four hundred Brentford supporters. I helped a group of older fans who had never used Zoom record their experiences on their phones, then edited it into a ninety-minute feature. Those voices persuaded the club's leadership to postpone a planned season-ticket price rise and to keep twelve ground-maintenance staff employed.

What I learned was simple. When the images disappear, the sound remains. When the stands are empty, the community's voice is still broadcasting. That is why I treat anonymous supporters as a key source, not as decoration at the end of a piece.

Now back to the sports business, because it bears directly on how clubs handle fan emotion. More and more clubs seek to list on stock exchanges, or to sell stakes to investment funds. Manchester United listed in New York in 2026. Juventus has traded in Milan since 2026. Borussia Dortmund and AS Roma once chose a similar route.

Listing a club turns fan emotion into a tradable asset. And once emotion becomes an asset, financial-reporting pressure begins to weigh on sporting decisions. A manager can be dismissed not for losing three matches, but because commercial revenue fell in a quarter. A young player can be sold not because he is not good enough, but because cash flow needs balancing.

This is where I see a parallel with the sound story. When a club lists, what is being valued is loyalty. But loyalty does not appear on a balance sheet. It lives in the singing, in the habit of going to the ground every two weeks, in a father taking his son as his own father once did. No index captures that, and so it is always undervalued in short-term decisions.

The same is true of gaming. Rockstar does not sell a playlist. It sells the feeling of belonging to a world. Players do not buy Lana Del Rey or Bad Bunny; they buy the moment of driving at night, alone, with the right song. Football also sells belonging, but is increasingly selling it through tools that are too safe.

There is a small detail I always notice at press conferences. Before the manager enters, there is a silence of about thirty seconds. In that silence you hear a great deal: chairs shifting, breathing, someone turning a page. I used to think of it as dead air. Now I think of it as the truest part of the press conference.

Every ball begins with a mis-touch. I learned that line literally at Luzhniki, Moscow, in 2026, when the World Cup was the first major tournament I was sent to cover, at twenty-three. In the semi-final where England lost to Croatia, I was given two minutes for a quick mixed-zone interview and mispronounced Luka Modrić's name three times live on camera. That night I did not sleep; I replayed the tape and counted the breaths of the Croatian players as they embraced in celebration.

From that mistake I built the habit of opening a piece with sound rather than a scoreline. Studs scraping along a corridor. A sigh after the final whistle. One corner of a stand singing while the home side is losing. Those non-verbal details appear in no statistic, yet they are the truth.

And this is where the story grows more complex. In 2026, the Euro final at Wembley ended in England's defeat on penalties to Italy. Bukayo Saka, nineteen years old, missed the decisive kick and then faced a wave of racist abuse online. Through the supporter network from the Brentford forum, I reached a childhood friend of Saka's in Hackney and gathered twenty-three stories from the Arsenal community.

I wrote a piece headlined A ball does not define a person, stressing how a club and its fans can protect each other rather than blame each other. It was shared more than fifty thousand times. But the thing I remember most is not the number.

A piece shared fifty thousand times does not come from a number; it comes from a heart touched in the right place. Since then, every piece I write about a young player must answer one question: how is the community around him affected. I began interviewing family, neighbours and youth coaches instead of only chasing current team-mates.

What does this have to do with GTA VI. More than you might think. Both football and gaming face the same problem: how to protect young people in an environment where attention is currency. In games, that means online bullying, harassment in chat rooms, the pressure to be good. In football, it means racist abuse online, humiliation after a mistake, and an industry of media that likes to find someone to blame.

In both places, the default public reaction is to find an individual to hold responsible. In gaming, the developer is blamed for a toxic community. In football, the young player is blamed for a single moment. That reaction is always wrong, because it ignores the system.

Now to the counter-argument I want to make. When a story about games and music appears, the laziest reaction in sport is to try to copy gaming: hire a DJ, make short-form content, imitate the hype. I think that is the wrong lesson.

The right lesson is not in the form. It is in the philosophy. Rockstar did not succeed because they used better music than anyone else. They succeeded because they treated sound as a structural part of the product, designed from the outset, not added at the end to look nice. Football usually does the reverse: design the match first, then think about atmosphere.

The biggest blind spot of modern football lies here. We have hundreds of tactical analysts, thousands of hours of video, millions of data points. But almost nobody is paid to answer the question: what does this stadium sound like on a wet Tuesday night. We measure everything except the thing that brings people back.

Football is a conversation, not a monologue. The empty months taught me that beyond dispute. When there is no one in the ground, people realise that what they miss is not the goals, but the feeling of being in one space together, hearing the same thing.

That is why I do not treat the GTA VI story as an aside. It is a reminder. While a gaming company spends years polishing every second of sound for a city that does not exist, many real football clubs play the same playlist every week and wonder why the terraces fall quiet.

Of course, I do not want to be misunderstood. I am not demanding that clubs turn stadiums into concerts. Football's atmosphere cannot be manufactured from above. It grows from the community, from songs written by supporters themselves, from traditions passed down generations. The club's role is not to compose, but to make space for those voices to rise.

What is worrying is that many clubs do the opposite. They control the sound, standardise it, and inadvertently flatten the very thing that makes them different. A stadium that sounds like a shopping centre is a stadium slowly losing its reason to exist.

There is a paradox worth considering. Gaming, often accused of being detached from reality, is doing very well at creating a sense of community around a fictional world. Football, which has a real community, is gradually losing that feeling inside its own product. This reversal does not come from technology. It comes from choice.

If I had to name one signal to watch in the coming months, it is this. When GTA VI launches on November 19, 2026, watch how people talk about the music in the game. They will remember a song title, a moment, a feeling. And ask yourself: will anyone talk about a match that way, naming a sound rather than a goal.

The answer depends on whether football still treats the terrace as a character. If it does, every matchday remains a broadcast, and every supporter remains an unpaid presenter. If it does not, we will keep getting matches perfectly optimised for images, and ever quieter in emotion.

Saka does not need forgiveness; he needs someone to stand beside him, without judgement. And football, in a sense, is the same. It does not need another grand anthem. It needs someone to listen to its own voice.

I still keep that notebook of sound. The most recent page holds a line from last Saturday night: the eighty-eighth minute, the home side a goal up, the whole stand on its feet and singing, nobody looking at the screen. That is what I want to protect, and also what I fear will disappear if no one agrees to put an ear to the grass.