Ee sala cup namde: The journey of RCB's fan chant from joke, jinx to jubilation

Though the joy was marred by the tragic stampede that claimed 11 lives during the victory parade, the emotion behind that chant, the sense of unity and belonging it sparked, will stay with Bengaluru for a long time.

They say sports brings people together, cutting across thick boundaries of nations, states, and languages. And every year, while politics and language debates fail to do it, the Indian Premier League (IPL) proves it true – especially in Bengaluru.

This is a city where language debates are part of everyday life. North Indian migrants often live here for years without picking up Kannada, and the tension around that runs deep. But during the IPL season, all of it takes a backseat.

Someone sitting in Delhi or Lucknow — or even in Bengaluru, barely aware of what 'Ee Sala Cup Namde' literally means — will still chant it with full energy. It does not matter if they have never been to Karnataka or cannot read a single street sign here. The slogan has become bigger than the translation.

Because when you have backed a team through heartbreak after heartbreak, and laughed your way through years of memes and missed chances, you do not need to know the language — you just need to believe.

And this time, for the first time, that belief paid off. Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB) are finally champions, and the slogan that began as hope, turned into a meme, a jinx, and a punchline, is now a prophecy fulfilled.

Ee Sala Cup Namde (The Cup will be ours this time) is the popular slogan or rather a fan chant of RCB while the official one still remains Play Bold. The chant however, did not surface until 2016-17. According to a Redditor, the slogan was started on Kannada Facebook pages to boost the morale of RCB after the team lost to Sunrisers Hyderabad in the 2016 IPL final.

As the team had a dismal performance in 2017 and finished last in the points table, the slogan ended up on popular meme pages as fans of other IPL teams trolled RCBians.

By 2018, official pages of RCB and Bengaluru City Police also started acknowledging the slogan. By this time, while the slogans of other teams like CSK’s “Whistle Podu” and MI’s “Duniya Hila Denge Hum” were rooted in dominance, in the face of constant heartbreaks, RCB’s ‘Ee Sala Cup Namde’ had started feeling like a jinx.

While some X (formerly Twitter) users labelled it the most overused term of 2018, others compared it to football fans’ ‘It’s coming home’ and said that both the chants are just bad omens, a running joke that hurt a little more every season.

So dark was the hue of jinx associated with the slogan for a largely superstitious country like ours that even after finally lifting the trophy, Indian cricket legend Sunil Gavaskar could not help but say that “the popular slogan had become a jinx, and RCB won their maiden IPL trophy in a season when the slogan was toned down.”

But as netizens are hailing 2025 as the year of underdogs, with PSG winning the Champions League and RCB lifting the IPL trophy, the bad omen seems to have finally faded.

While it can be freely said that the jinx was finally broken on June 3, 2025 with Ee Sala Cup Namde reaching its all time peak on Google Trends at 11:30 pm, RCB’s Women team actually took off much of the negativity linked to the chant after the team won the Women’s Premier League in 2024 and captain Smriti Mandhana tweaked the slogan to say Ee Sala Cup Namdu (The Cup is ours this time).

The men’s team, which finally brought the trophy home after 18 years, echoed Smriti’s words. "I'm going to start off by repeating what our captain (Rajat Patidar) said (during the trophy presentation ceremony on Tuesday night). It's no more ee sala cup namde, it's ee sala cup namdu," said Virat Kohli to a rousing applause and roar from the gathered crowd. The search term remained at its peak and trended for an hour from 11:30 pm to 12:30 am between June 3 and 4. For a fanbase that has known nothing but heartbreak for nearly two decades, this win felt surreal.

RCB's win finally gave fans the ending they had waited years for as ‘Ee Sala Cup Namde’ once a meme, a jinx, a joke, now feels like a reward for loyalty and belief.

And though the joy was marred by the tragic stampede that claimed 11 lives during the victory parade, the emotion behind that chant, the sense of unity and belonging it sparked, will stay with Bengaluru for a long, long time.