From a PlayStation Controller to IFA’s Anthem Booth: The Spill Freak Story
There’s a particular kind of Calcutta evening where you can hear three things at once – a Mohun Bagan chant drifting out of a tea stall, a football commentary blaring from someone’s phone, and somewhere in the mix, a bassline. For Soumayan Sarkar, better known on stage as Spill Freak, those three sounds have always been the same sound.
He didn’t arrive at rap through a studio or a mentor. He arrived through a PlayStation controller. The adrenaline of a game, the rhythm of a track playing over it – that combination hooked him early, and by 2013 he was out on the streets of Calcutta building a name for himself in a hip-hop scene that was still finding its feet in Bengal. What he didn’t know yet was that his music career would eventually collide, almost inevitably, with a family story that had been waiting more than a century to be set to a beat.
A Story That Starts in 1911
Every artist has an origin story. Spill Freak’s happens to be a footnote in Indian football history that his family never let him forget.
His grandfather, Arun Kr. Sarkar, was the maternal grandson of the late Uma Pati Kumar – a footballer who represented India internationally and played for Mohun Bagan AC in the Calcutta Football League. Kumar was one of the legendary “special 11,” the squad that delivered Mohun Bagan’s landmark IFA Shield victory in 1911, a moment still recited in Bengal like scripture. Growing up on those stories, in a house where Mohun Bagan wasn’t a club you supported but a bloodline you belonged to, Spill Freak absorbed something most rappers never get handed for free: a reason his football songs would never feel like marketing copy.
The Track That Went Everywhere
That inheritance stayed quiet for years, until 2020 gave it an outlet. During that season’s ISL, Spill Freak teamed up with fellow rapper FlameC, of Swadhin Dol, to write a tribute track for ATK Mohun Bagan. Neither of them expected what happened next. The song spread across social media overnight, racking up numbers neither artist had seen before – and then it crossed a line few fan anthems ever do. Roy Krishna’s wife, along with other ATK-MB players’ wives, were filmed dancing to the track, and that clip went just as viral as the song itself.
You can hear where it all began right here:
🎥 Watch the Shobuj Meroon Fan Anthem: https://youtu.be/mYk9tUbuDkE?si=XZYnQ4JwhelPc8AO
That one track quietly created a new identity for Spill Freak – not just a Calcutta rapper, but the football rapper. Soon he was writing for Bengal KOP, a grassroots collective built around rising footballers from rural Bengal, taking his music to the parts of the game that rarely get songs written about them at all.
The Anthem Era Begins
If 2020 was the spark, 2026 is where Spill Freak’s football-rap career stopped being a side project and became something clubs and leagues actively came looking for.
Early this year, he composed the official anthem for JHR Royal City (Malda Murshidabad) in the Bengal Super League – a track that pulled in a wave of recognition well beyond his existing fanbase.
📱 Watch the JHR City Official Anthem (BSL): https://www.instagram.com/reel/DT7BVvBAaAb/?igsh=a24xdXd3dnJhM2hk
Then came the call he hadn’t dared to expect: the Indian Football Association reached out, asking him to compose the anthem for the Calcutta Football League – one of the oldest and most historic football competitions in all of Asia. Spill Freak said yes before he’d even finished hearing the pitch. He’d been sitting on an idea for a while, wanting to build anthem music in Baile Funk style, the way international football anthems are often produced abroad. CFL gave him exactly the canvas he’d been waiting for, and when the track was done, IFA loved it.
Around the same stretch, Zee5 came knocking too, inviting him to write a rap for their football docu-series Banglar Goal Golpo. Spill Freak penned the track quickly, the shoot wrapped soon after, and the song now lives inside the show for anyone who wants to hear it.
▶️ Stream the Football Fever Song from Banglar Goal Golpo (S1E3, “Extra Time”): https://www.zee5.com/web-series/details/banglar-goal-golpo/0-6-4z5985618/extra-time/0-1-6z5998844
What Comes Next
The biggest track is still under wraps. The CFL anthem hasn’t been released yet – Spill Freak is holding it back for one moment: performing it live at the league’s opening ceremony on 12 July 2026. Beyond that, he’s got solo material in the pipeline and is already piecing together a full album he hopes to put out before the year ends.
It’s a strange, fitting arc for someone whose love of rap started with a game controller and whose love of football started at a dinner table listening to stories about 1911. A century after Uma Pati Kumar helped Mohun Bagan make history on the pitch, his family’s blood is still finding its way into how that history gets told – just now, it’s over a beat instead of a scoreline.
