Wales National Team Songs: From Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau to Don’t Take Me Home

Wales supporters have spent a decade being told they are the best thing about Welsh football, which is simultaneously a nice compliment and an awkward one. The Red Wall grew out of the qualifying campaign for Euro 2016 and has since followed the team to France, Baku, Rome, Qatar and, last summer, to Switzerland, where more than 8,000 of them watched the women’s team at a major tournament for the first time. They travel in numbers a country of three million has no business producing and they turn up with a songbook that owes as much to the Welsh language as it does to football.

The team they follow is in a strange spot. Craig Bellamy, appointed in the July of 2024, took Wales to second in World Cup qualifying Group J behind Belgium, losing only twice in fourteen competitive games and both times to the Belgians. Then came the 26th of March 2026 at Cardiff City Stadium, where Daniel James volleyed Wales in front against Bosnia and Herzegovina, Edin Dzeko headed an equaliser with four minutes left and Bosnia won the shootout 4-2 in front of 32,487 people. No World Cup 2026 for the Welsh supporters to sing at, sadly.

What follows is not the complete Wales songbook, because it’s fair to say that no such thing exists. We have stuck to what the Cardiff City Stadium crowd and the away following actually sing, which means leaving out the hymns and the Tom Jones. Calon Lân, Cwm Rhondda and Delilah belong to the Principality Stadium and its choirs. The football crowd has built something of its own and most of it has come together in the last fifteen years or so, even whilst the Wales supporters have been getting behind the football team for many more years than that.

Main Image: Jeremy Segrott from Cardiff, Wales, UK, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau

In some ways, it is a bit of a cheat to include a national anthem in this list. Yet, when it comes to the Welsh, they give theirs so much more gusto than the English, to say nothing of the fact that it’s also just much better. It was written in the January of 1856 in Pontypridd by Evan James, a weaver who supplied the words, and his son James James, a harpist who supplied the tune. It went out originally as Glan Rhondda and was first performed in the vestry of Capel Tabor in Maesteg by a young Pontypridd singer called Elizabeth John.

No act of Parliament ever made it the national anthem. People simply sang it until nobody could picture an alternative, and the earliest manuscript is now held by the National Library of Wales. What earns the football version its own entry is the arrangement, or rather the absence of one. The backing track cuts out after the first verse and the crowd carries the rest on its own. The habit came from a qualifier in Georgia in 2017, when the music was cut off early by accident and the travelling support sang on anyway. This is what they sing:

Mae hen wlad fy nhadau yn annwyl i mi,
Gwlad beirdd a chantorion, enwogion o fri;
Ei gwrol ryfelwyr, gwladgarwyr tra mad,
Dros ryddid collasant eu gwaed.
Gwlad! Gwlad! Pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad.
Tra môr yn fur i’r bur hoff bau,
O bydded i’r hen iaith barhau.

Yma o Hyd

Dafydd Iwan recorded Yma o Hyd in 1981 and released it in 1983, with the folk group Ar Log, during a stretch when the coal industry was being dismantled and the future of the Welsh language looked bleak. The song reaches back to Macsen Wledig and the year 383 to make a simple argument, which is that the Welsh and their language have outlasted everything sent to finish them off. The line of the song that the whole ground knows and sings with gusto is “Ry’n ni yma o hyd”, meaning we are still here.

Football adopted it during the campaign that ended the 64-year wait for a World Cup appearance. The FAW put Iwan on the pitch to sing it live before the play-off against Ukraine in June 2022, in horizontal rain, with the crowd doing the heavy lifting behind him, and it was later remastered as the official Qatar song using recordings of supporters taken at Cardiff City Stadium. It has not faded since. Wales fans sang it in Lucerne and St Gallen during Euro 2025, and players’ families were still singing it in the stands at midnight after the team had gone out.

The politics are not incidental and Iwan has never pretended otherwise. He has publicly asked right-wing groups to stop singing it at protests against the housing of asylum seekers, telling BBC Radio Cymru that he did not want his song associated with them. It has also been used by Wrexham and by rugby crowds, so football cannot claim exclusive ownership, only the loudest version. The actual song is long, but here’s a taster of it:

Dwyt ti’m yn cofio Macsen
Does neb yn ei nabod o;
Mae mil a chwe chant o flynyddoedd
Yn amser rhy hir i’r cof;
Pan aeth Magnus Maximus o Gymru
Yn y flwyddyn tri-chant-wyth-tri
A’n gadael yn genedl gyfan
A heddiw: wele ni!

 

Ry’n ni yma o hyd
Ry’n ni yma o hyd
Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth
Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth
Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth
Ry’n ni yma o hyd
Ry’n ni yma o hyd
Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth
Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth
Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth
Ry’n ni yma o hyd

Can’t Take My Eyes Off You

This one is borrowed and there is no point dressing it up. The song was written by Bob Crewe and Bob Gaudio and was a hit for Frankie Valli in 1967, then for Andy Williams the following year. It has since been adopted by half the football grounds in Europe. Its Welsh life began with a BBC Wales promotion for the 1994 World Cup qualifying campaign, the one that ended a game short of the finals, with supporters simply keeping it after the television trailers stopped being played.

That is why it carries more weight in Cardiff than the average borrowed pop tune. Kelly Jones of the Stereophonics recorded an acoustic version as a tribute to Gary Speed in the wake of his passing and it was played at Speed’s funeral in 2011, whilst the Manic Street Preachers built Wales’ official Euro 2016 song, Together Stronger (C’mon Wales), on the same melody. What belongs to Wales is the brass hook at the front of it, which is the bit the crowd bellows without needing any words at all. These are just some of the lyrics they do sing:

I love you, baby
And if it’s quite alright, I need you, baby
To warm a lonely night, I love you, baby
Trust in me when I say

 

Oh, pretty baby
Don’t bring me down, I pray, oh pretty baby
Now that I found you, stay
And let me love you, baby
Let me love you

The Barry Horns & the Player Songs

The Barry Horns are a brass band made up of Wales supporters, put together in 2011 by the BBC Wales promos director, Fez Watkins, and named in tribute to the former captain, Barry Horne. Their first outing was on the street outside the Wales v England World Cup qualifier in Cardiff on the 26th of March 2011. The founding idea, by Watkins’ own account, was to replace the plastic hooters of the era with brass ones. They are the reason a set of chants that once fitted on one hand grew into something resembling a repertoire.

Their party trick was giving individual players their own tune. Joe Ledley got Ain’t Nobody, Hal Robson-Kanu got Push It, Joe Allen got Gimme Hope Jo’anna, and Give It Up went to Gareth Bale before being handed on to Kieffer Moore. Player songs date faster than anything else in a songbook, though, and most of that generation has now retired, taking their tunes with them. They still surface on good nights, in the way old songs do when the score is comfortable and the crowd is feeling sentimental, hence their mention here.

Don’t Take Me Home

The one that everybody outside Wales recognises started on a night in Brussels in the November of 2014, when a point against Belgium turned qualifying from a hope into an expectation. It went to France with the support the following summer and became the sound of Euro 2016, sung in Bordeaux and Toulouse and Lille and finally in Lyon, where Wales lost a semi-final and their fans stayed behind to sing anyway.

It is not Welsh in origin, nor is it exclusive, since England supporters sang it at Euro 2020 and club crowds up and down the country still do. What Wales have is the association, which is strong enough that a trio of musicians from Blackwood rebuilt it in 2022 as The Grass Is Greener (Don’t Take Me Home) for the trip to Qatar, with any proceeds going to Welsh charities. The original words are the supporters’ own, and they are short enough to give in full:

Don’t take me home,
Please don’t take me home,
I just don’t wanna go to work,
I wanna stay here and drink all your beer,
So please don’t, please don’t take me home.