The Story Of How Ajax Amsterdam Immortalized Bob Marley With “Three Little Birds”
On a cold and wet night in Cardiff, Wales in 2008, in a pre-season game between European giants Ajax Amsterdam and Cardiff City, a moment…
On a cold and wet night in Cardiff, Wales in 2008, in a pre-season game between European giants Ajax Amsterdam and Cardiff City, a moment of everlasting consequences and one that would sow unbridled hope throughout the football world would contrive to occur after the final whistle was blown.
The game that night ended 0–0 but the travelling Ajax fans were asked to remain inside the stadium at the away end after the game was over.
Cardiff’s then-in-stadium announcer Ali Yassine was asked to entertain the Ajax fans huddled up in the away stand by playing some music. After some deliberation, and rather impulsively, he decided to play Bob Marley’s iconic song “Three Little Birds”.
The song itself was a massive hit from Bob Marley’s 1977 album ‘Exodus’, but that night as the song blared through the speakers in Cardiff, something unexpected and beautiful happened.
The Ajax fans inside the stadium immediately recognised the song and were so moved by it that they began shouting and singing the lyrics at the top of their voices clapping and singing along long after the final whistle.
Such was the impact and pervading feeling and vibe in the stadium that night while the song was played on the speaker system in Cardiff, that the Ajax fans back home in the Netherlands decided to go one step further by adopting the song as their official club anthem.
Ajax fans have stated that they were always looking for a club anthem and were searching for one for many years but after that game in Cardiff, they decided to make “Three Little Birds” their own.
Since then, at Ajax’s home stadium, the Johan Cruyff Arena, the 50,000 or more Ajax fans in attendance sing the song “Three Little Birds” word for word during every game.
The occurrence hasn’t stopped at being sung only at their home stadium with the Dutch club’s fans taking the song with them for away fixtures and singing the song at away matches as well.
The legendary musician Marley was also a huge football fan and advocate of the beautiful game and often described football as a world of ‘freedom’
As recounted on Bob Marley’s official website it reads:
“It’s impossible not to be moved by over 50,000 voices joined as one to sing a song of peace and love. But anyone entering the Ajax Amsterdam football stadium might be surprised that the crowd of Dutch fans is joined in a rousing rendition of Bob Marley’s, ‘Three little Birds’, a hit from his 1977 album Exodus. It might seem like an unlikely anthem for the team, but it’s been wholeheartedly adopted by the club as a show of solidarity and support for the players on the field. What many of the singers in the stadium might not realize is how happy Bob, a lifelong footballer, would have been to hear his lyrics floating out over the pitch at every game. After all, it was Bob who once said: “Football is a whole skill to itself. A whole world. A whole universe to itself. Football is freedom.”
In 2012, Bob Marley’s son Ky-Mani heard about the phenomenon and travelled to Amsterdam to attend an Ajax game and sing the song in front of the audience at the Johan Cruyff Arena, a moment he later described as being a “life changing experience”.
The sports media outlet ‘Bleacher Report’ made a short documentary piece about this story and the song which has touched lives across the world of sport because of the Ajax fans.
Now, decades after his death, the legendary musician Bob Marley has been immortalised by the sport he so dearly loved by the Ajax fans in a fitting way with current and future generations of the club’s fans singing the song from the trenches and terraces of their home stadium and in away games in a united message of love, peace, hope and freedom, something which Marley himself would have surely been moved by were he still alive.
The ‘message’ to the world from Bob Marley and now sung by the Ajax fans to this day remains, “Don’t worry about a thing / Every little thing is going to be alright.”
