The News in DataCULTURE
№ 025 · OCT. 23, 2026

Rappers Have Named Manu Ginóbili In At Least 1,489 Songs, And Most Came After He Retired

Songs naming the Spurs guard rose after Drake and Future's "Jumpman" in 2015, peaked in 2020 and still number more than 70 a year.

By Samuel W. Bennett · Genius lyrics data
1,489SONGS ON GENIUS
THAT NAME HIM
63%CAME OUT AFTER
HE RETIRED
Rappers have named Manu Ginóbili in at least 1,489 songs posted to Genius, the lyrics site, according to our search of its lyrics, nearly all of them rap songs. About 63% of the songs with a release date came out after he retired from the San Antonio Spurs in August 2018, more than came out during his 16 seasons in the NBA.
A slow start, then "Jumpman"Ginóbili won NBA titles with the Spurs in 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2014, but no year before 2013 had more than 11 songs naming him. The count climbed to 39 in 2014 and 100 in 2016, after Drake and Future's "Jumpman" (September 2015) named him. "Jumpman" has about 3.4 million views on Genius, more than twice as many as any other song that names him.
The peak came after he retiredThe count reached 163 songs in 2020, two years after his last game, and has stayed between 73 and 82 a year from 2023 through 2025. There were 44 through Oct. 23 this year. The two most-viewed songs after "Jumpman" both came out after he retired: NLE Choppa's "Shotta Flow" (2019), with about 1.6 million views, and Pop Smoke's "Hello" (2020), with about 711,000. The Argentine rapper Duki named him in "Givenchy" (2022).
What rappers say about himTwo details come up again and again. About 1 in 8 songs mention his left hand, and about 1 in 11 refer to his Euro step, the side-to-side drive he helped popularize in the NBA, or to his footwork. About 1 in 22 name a Spurs teammate or coach on the same line. Jokes about his hairline, which a Revista Noticias article on rappers and Ginóbili highlighted this month, appear in only about 1 in 65. We counted a detail only when it appeared on the same line as his name.
Who names him mostJuice WRLD named Ginóbili in 14 songs, more than any other artist, and 10 of them have no release date on Genius, which usually marks recordings that were never officially released. No other musician named him in more than 7 songs, so the total is spread across more than 1,300 artists.

What the data can't tell us

Genius depends on users to post and transcribe songs, so it misses some songs and includes unreleased ones, and 214 of the songs have no release date. We also tried to compare him with Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Steve Nash, Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, Vince Carter and Kobe Bryant, but Genius returns at most about 1,000 results per search and every one of those searches hit the limit, so the data can't rank him against them. Lines that use only his first name, Manu, are not counted. The search finds misspellings such as "Ginobli," which are counted.

How we counted: we ran 14 searches of Genius's lyrics for Ginóbili's surname, its misspellings and phrases that pair it with other words, then kept songs whose lyrics name him, either in the full lyrics we checked or in the lyric excerpt Genius returns. We removed Genius articles, translations and transcripts of games, and counted versions of the same song by the same artist (remixes, freestyles, session recordings) once. Release years are Genius's. Detail counts use the line that names him. Career dates: Spurs and NBA records via Sports Illustrated. Searches run Oct. 23, 2026. Download the data.