The best Eurovision songs that never won

This is an opinion. There is no objective ranking of songs and anyone offering you one is selling a list. What follows is an argument, and the interesting part is the reasoning rather than the order.

The premise: the scoreboard measures one live performance on one Saturday, judged partly by juries assessing craft and partly by a public voting in a three-hour window. It does not measure whether a song is good, and it certainly does not measure whether a song will still be playing in ten years. These are the entries where the gap between those two things is widest.

The list

1. "Soldi" — Mahmood, Italy, 2019 Finished second. Went on to become one of the most-streamed songs in Eurovision history and a genuine hit across southern Europe. It won the televote comfortably and lost on juries, which is the exact profile of a record that outlives its result.

2. "Think About Things" — Daði Freyr, Iceland, 2020 Never competed. The 2020 contest was cancelled, and the song became a global hit anyway — arguably the most widely heard Eurovision entry of its decade, from a contest that did not happen. It is on this list as the strongest possible evidence that the scoreboard is not the point.

3. "Shum" — Go_A, Ukraine, 2021 Fifth. Won the televote. A Ukrainian-language folk-techno record that made no concession whatsoever to what a Eurovision entry is supposed to sound like, and it is the entry from that year people still play.

4. "Cha Cha Cha" — Käärijä, Finland, 2023 Second, and the defining example of the jury-televote split. It won the public vote by an enormous margin and lost the contest, which caused a genuine crisis of confidence about the jury system that the EBU responded to.

5. "Nel blu, dipinto di blu (Volare)" — Domenico Modugno, Italy, 1958 Third. It is one of the most recorded songs of the twentieth century. Nobody can name what beat it.

6. "Eres tú" — Mocedades, Spain, 1973 Second, and a worldwide hit that charted in the United States, which almost no Eurovision entry has ever done.

7. "Bangaranga" — Dara, Bulgaria, 2026 Won. Included because the whole reason this site exists is that it did, and because a list of great songs that lost is incomplete without noting how rarely the system gets it this right.

The actual argument

The jury-televote split is the mechanism behind most of this list. Juries reward vocal control, arrangement and stagecraft — the things a professional can assess in one viewing. Televotes reward impact, identity and the feeling of having witnessed something.

Songs that outlive their contest tend to win the televote and lose the juries, because the public is voting on the thing that also makes a record last. That is not an argument for abolishing juries; a pure televote produces its own distortions, and the contest has tried it. It is an argument for reading the scoreboard as what it is: a specific measurement, not a verdict.

Disagree with the order. That is the point of the section.