Can football songs be good?

 

By Manuel Gemperli

One of the things on my bucket list is a visit to Anfield Road, Liverpool F.C.’s legendary home stadium. I love football (I thought about it and decided to use the term football instead of soccer – not to prove a point, but because it just feels more natural), so watching a game there sounds really fun, but the thing that really intrigues me about it is their famous pre-game ritual. Before every game their fans sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. No, they don’t just sing it – they live it, the feel it, they turn what originally was written as a show tune into an anthem. It feels like an almost religious experience. I have only watched this on tv and yet it sends shivers down my spine every time. If I’m getting goose bumps while my ass is sitting on the sofa, I can only imagine what it would feel like if I was there in the middle of it all. 

If you ever visited a football game in a stadium, you know that singing is an integral part of the experience. Football causes grown (and ungrown) men and women to cry - sometimes out of joy, sometimes out of agony. The emotions, the history, the ecstasy make it so much more than just a game of 22 guys trying to kick a ball into a net. I know this sounds melodramatic, but you would only think that if you’ve never experienced the heartbreak of your club or country losing in the last second. Or in a penalty shootout. The pain.

Clearly, music and football pair really well. Considering that and the fact that there are countless musicians who are huge football fans, you would think there’s a whole slew of great football songs. But there aren’t. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” doesn’t have anything to do with sports. Neither do other stadium favorites like “Seven Nation Army”, “I Will Survive” or “Song 2”. I often wondered why that is. Wouldn’t the emotional connection people feel to football lend itself perfectly for songwriting? There are wonderful songs about all kinds of emotions, including seemingly trivial things like drinking and drugging. There is one great exception though: Lightning Seeds’ “Three Lions”, the best song about football I’ve ever heard.

It’s no surprise that it had to be English people to write it. This isn’t a cheap “Let’s go team red - score a goal” ordeal. Ian Broudie described it well when he said that this was a song about “being a football fan, which, for 90% of the time, is losing”. And not only that. Football is a game of constant failure. It’s simple. The goal is to put that ball in the goal. This happens on average roughly 2 to 3 times in a span of 90 minutes. (Sometimes, it doesn’t happen at all.) This means that the whole rest of the time both teams are failing to achieve what they set out to do. It’s a constant try and error, mostly error. And that’s why it’s so great. That’s what makes it poetic. Failure is always more interesting than triumph. So when somebody does score, it’s a big deal. There is such a satisfaction in that moment the ball hits the net. Winning only feels good when you experienced losing. English people tend to shine at eloquent self-depreciation. Like this:

I think it's bad news for the English game

We're not creative enough, and we're not positive enough

England's gonna throw it away, gonna blow it away

England has only won one big tournament - Euros or World Cup - in their entire history (in 1966, you know before the first moon landing) even though they are credited to be the inventors of the game. When you’re a football fan (especially of a mostly losing team – the real kind of fan), you might be cynical, you might make fun of your own team constantly, but you also know that feeling that this tournament, this season is gonna be the one.

Thirty years of hurt

Never stopped me dreaming

It was thirty years of hurt when they wrote this song in 1996. Now, it’s been sixty years for them and I’m sure they’re still dreaming. There’s hope. This song wouldn’t have become the anthem that it is if it was all gloom. There’s the nostalgia of past triumphs or in England’s case mainly almost triumphs described by little details all English fans know about – the lore that is so important and uniting. The lyrics find the right balance, but what makes this song so great is that it would also work as a “regular” song. It captures the vibe of mid 90’s Cool Britannia. The exhilarating quality of its chorus would be amazing with any words. It’s designed to be sang arm in arm, beer in hand, united with like-minded people, whether those guys on the field blow it or not, whether football is coming home or not. Singing about football has been mostly a history of failure, but this one score feels great. Kinda fitting. 

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