Why do Dortmund sing 'You'll Never Walk Alone'?

The song, which fills supporters with hope and unity pre-match, has a long and storied history in European football, especially at the Signal Iduna Park.

'YNWA' originated from a 1909 Hungarian play called Liliom and was later popularised in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical Carousel. It became part of football folklore in Liverpool in 1963 when local band Gerry and the Pacemakers covered the song and saw it blast to no.1 in the charts.

It soon became a permanent fixture at Anfield, and three years later it was embedded into the fabric of two more European giants.

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Dortmund faced the Reds in the 1966 Cup Winners’ Cup final, a game which they won 2-1, but they earned far more than just a trophy after Reinhard Libuda’s extra-time winner. Dortmund experienced 'You’ll Never Walk Alone' pre-match, and it stuck with them ever since.

In fact, they weren’t the only ones. In the semi-final, Celtic also got their rendition and have also kept the anthem, meaning the two teams are set for an epic duet when they clash on Matchday 2 in the UEFA Champions League on 1 October.

For Dortmund, it’s now theirs as much as anyone's, as German author and historian Ulrich Hesse once explained: “The vast majority of normal German fans have no idea that the song is very closely linked to Liverpool and Celtic. They think it’s widely sung at football games.”

That may be because one of their rivals, and another of Klopp’s former sides, Mainz, have also adopted it, with the coach recounting: “In Germany, only two clubs sing 'You’ll Never Walk Alone' before the game, and that is Mainz and Dortmund… Now I’ve come to the original place, if you want, and it never stops feeling really special. It never stops creating goosebumps. That’s how it is. I’m a football romantic and I like tradition in football and all that stuff.”

Feyenoord also belt out the anthem pre-match, while St. Pauli, Kaiserslautern and Twente are also known to sing it. Further afield, Japanese side FC Tokyo have made it their own, too.

Many of those can’t boast such an epic rendition as Dortmund, though, who now sing the song religiously 10 minutes before kick-off at every home match. They’ve got their own version, too, with local band Pur Harmony recording a version in the 1990s to make it a staple.

Singer Matthias Kartner recalled the making of their cover when speaking to Liverpool’s website, saying: “A good friend of ours told us 'you have to make a recording of 'You'll Never Walk Alone'. I thought 'oh no!' It's a nice song but it was difficult to make it because of the harmony of the music. It's hard to sing because at first you go very deep and then you go high, but a week later we made this recording. 

“We are Dortmund boys and big Borussia fans, so I gave the recording of 'You'll Never Walk Alone' to our stadium announcer and he took this and said 'very nice, we'll try this'. Norbert Dickel [announcer] tried to use the version by Gerry and the Pacemakers, but the fans liked our cover more."

The anthem proved to be a huge hit, and just a year after it became the club’s anthem in 1996, BVB picked up their first Champions League title with the song the inspiration as Ottmar Hitzfeld’s side overcame Manchester United at the Signal Iduna Park before downing Juventus in the final in Munich. The season before Borussia picked up their fifth Bundesliga title, and added three more with 'YNWA' the soundtrack to their success.

Since their 1966 meeting with Liverpool, BVB have been able to share the song with their fans on four occasions home and away, in the 2001/02 Champions League group stages and 2016 Europa League quarter-finals. With Celtic, the teams have faced off on four previous occasions, but this will be their first meeting with both boasting 'YNWA' as their anthem.

Like many of the fanbases who now hold up scarves with the four special words stitched across them, it’s a song that embodies Dortmund as a club - a fan-owned community side that has had to persevere through hardship only to come through the other side united as a team and reach new heights again.

It’s also a club where adding to the already incredible matchday experience is not an easy feat. The 81,365-capacity Westfalenstadion is one of the biggest sporting venues in world sport, and its 24,454-person ‘Yellow Wall’ is the biggest standing section in Europe, making BVB’s rendition of 'You’ll Never Walk Alone' one of the football’s greatest wonders.