Someone has to sing first

Every chant that fills a stadium in Riyadh began with one voice.

Now it sounds inevitable. Tens of thousands of people find the words at the same moment, as if the song had always existed.

But think about the first time. Someone in the stands stood up during a quiet stretch of the match and started a line nobody knew. The people around him could have joined in. They could just as easily have stared. For a few seconds he was a man singing to strangers, and there was no promise that anyone would come with him.

That is the moment most of us avoid. It is why there are so few songs a whole crowd knows, and so few of anything like them: the phrase a neighbourhood adopts, the slogan a team repeats, the brand line people quote back without being asked.

We see the finished version, with the crowd already roaring, and imagine the crowd came first. It never does. Somebody had to put the idea out with nothing echoing back, and keep going long enough for the second voice to arrive, then the tenth.

Most ideas that could have been taken up together are never heard at all, because whoever had them waited for a sign that others would join.

The sign does not come first. A crowd that answers is something you earn by being willing, for a while, to sing to no one.