There’s a very popular chant in soccer named “Dale Cavese” that you have probably seen on TV when watching a soccer game. This chant is especially used in the Netherlands, where almost every club uses it when trying to animate the crowd.
Many people wonder what’s the origin of this chant without knowing that it comes from a Venezuelan song called “Moliendo Cafe” that has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with soccer.
Moliendo Cafe: A Venezuelan Classic (1958)
Moliendo Cafe is a Venezuelan song written by Hugo Blanco, a Venezuelan composer who writes songs about cultural experiences inside Venezuela. Absolutely nothing to do with soccer.
What’s amazing is that Hugo Blanco wrote this song in 1958 and never imagined that Moliendo Cafe was going to be used by fans all around the world to cheer their soccer teams during games.
How Moliendo Cafe Became “Dale Cavese”
Everything started when the Boca Juniors band in Argentina started playing the song as part of their regular repertoire. The band played the song and the Boca fans started to learn the melody and sing it along with the band.
It started to be a popular chant for the crowd of many soccer clubs, so much so that Cavese would start to use it in every single game. They say that they wanted to recover their crowd after a terrible accident involving one of their star players.
Everywhere in the rest of the world, the song started to be used and the crowds started to tune it without any lyrics, just for the sake of supporting their teams all over the world.
From an 18-Year-Old Composer to Global Phenomenon
The story behind this song is highly impressive. The composer Hugo Blanco wrote the song in 1958 when he was only 18 years old. After that, it would become the most popular Venezuelan song till date, but it would also be transformed into what we know as “Dale Cavese.”
Global Variations
The most interesting variation comes from Besiktas club, where they removed a few notes from the melody and created a different version, but you can still easily recognize the original melody from Moliendo Cafe.
Fans from Aris club also had this song modified, using the exact same melody as the original Moliendo Cafe but adding their own lyrics.
In the Netherlands, practically everyone knows and chants Dale Cavese, but not many know that when they do it, they are chanting a song written by an 18-year-old boy in the 1950s in a remote country that had no idea his song would become the most known soccer chant of all times.
