Cavan Sullivan’s Pre-Game Playlist, All 53 Songs

A playlist made by a sixteen-year-old is not usually news. This one has been passed around on social media all week, mostly by people who could not get over the first half of it.

Cavan Sullivan’s Apple Music playlist is called The Warm-Up. It opens with Coldplay’s Sparks, then Creep, then three Smiths songs before track eight. There is Blackbird. There is Cigarettes After Sex, two Adrianne Lenker songs back to back, Frank Ocean’s Moon River, three Alex G songs, Julie Doiron, Mac DeMarco. Thirty songs in, a Veeze track arrives and the whole thing flips into two hours of Drake, Gunna, J. Cole and Philadelphia rap.

It is the pre-game routine of the youngest player in MLS history. It is also a better record collection than most people twice his age can claim.

The post that set it off went up on Tuesday night.

The playlist is on Apple Music here. All 53 songs are listed further down, in the order he plays them.

Sullivan was born in Philadelphia on September 28, 2009. He made his Union debut on July 17, 2024, coming on as a substitute against the New England Revolution at 14 years and 293 days old. That broke the record Freddy Adu had held since April 2004, when he played for D.C. United at 14 years and 306 days. Nobody younger has appeared in a major North American league.

The Union signed him to what was reported as the largest homegrown contract in MLS history, with an agreement that sends him to Manchester City when he turns 18. His older brother Quinn plays for the Union as well.

This season he stopped being a story about age. By the first week of September he had seven goals and 11 assists in 27 appearances across all competitions, and his 11 goal contributions in league play were the most ever by a 16-year-old, a mark Adu had set in 2005. He turns 17 at the end of this month.

The Warm-Up is an Apple Music series in which athletes share the music they play before they compete. Sullivan’s edition went up in March 2025, alongside playlists from other MLS players, and it has been sitting there since. It took a breakout season for people to actually look at it.

He described it to Apple Music like this: “Music is a key part of my game-day routine. This playlist represents my pre-game journey—from the early moments of mental preparation with calm tracks to the high-energy songs to get me hyped up, focused, and ready to play.”

That is exactly how it is built, and the seam is easy to find.

The first thirty tracks are the quiet. Sparks and Creep set the temperature. The Smiths get three songs, two of them from Louder Than Bombs, a compilation from 1987. The Lumineers appear three times, including two songs from Automatic, which came out last year. Then a run that reads like a college radio show: The Backseat Lovers, Caamp, Cigarettes After Sex twice, Adrianne Lenker’s anything and not a lot, just forever back to back, The Cranberries’ Zombie, Frank Ocean singing Moon River, Alex G, Julie Doiron’s August 10, Mac DeMarco’s My Kind of Woman, Current Joys, Lord Huron, and Coldplay again with The Scientist.

Track 31 is Safe 2 by Veeze, and the room changes. From there it is CN Tower, Drake’s Over My Dead Body, Gunna, J. Cole’s Snow on tha Bluff, Dave’s Starlight, Ghost Town, and then a stretch that is very specifically Philadelphia: three songs from Ot7 Quanny, who is from the city, and Lil Uzi Vert’s Do What I Want. Lil Durk, YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Tee Grizzley’s First Day Out, FloyyMenor’s Peligrosa and a JHAYCO track finish the loud part.

Then the last two songs are Mac DeMarco: Chamber of Reflection and For the First Time. Whatever is playing in the tunnel, the playlist ends by coming back down.

There is a version of this piece that makes too much of it. He is sixteen. He likes what he likes, and a lot of what is here is what plenty of sixteen-year-olds listen to now, because the internet flattened the decades a long time ago. The Smiths and Alex G live next to each other on the same feed.

But it does tell you something about how he handles the part of the job nobody sees. A player who has been the youngest person in every room since he was fourteen has a routine, and the routine starts slow. An hour and a half of Julie Doiron and Adrianne Lenker before anything is allowed to get loud.

The full running order is below. It runs three hours and eight minutes, which is a lot of warm-up.

The playlist is on Apple Music. The Union’s season, match by match, is here.