If you ever need proof that football is not an entertainment business, you only have to consider one thing: chants.
In an entertainment business, the people respond to the quality of what they have paid to see. Gigs, plays, comedy shows, films, exhibitions, immersive theatre, whatever: if it’s good, people will like it and react accordingly. If it’s bad, likewise.
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Football isn’t like that, because when crowds are allowed into football grounds, they will respond, among other ways, by chanting and singing regardless of how good the game is. They will scream and shout and curse and express their displeasure, but fans will always sing and chant.
Every club has chants. From the smallest non-League team to the European champions: they might not be unique, they might not be clever, they might not be particularly tuneful, but everyone sings. It’s one of the things that binds everyone together.
It’s also been one of the things that has defined the fundamental bleakness of pandemic football. The eery silence has sterilised the game, made us connect with it less. Any football is better than no football, but chantless football has been a homeopathic version. Hopefully, with the return of crowds, of fans, of people, that will change.
But why are chants so important? Why are they so intrinsic to football? How do chants start? How do they spread? What makes a good chant? How does it feel when you start a chant? How does it feel to have a chant about you? Where do some of the better known/stranger chants come from?
This is an attempt to explain.
In his book We Lose Every Week: The History Of Football Chanting, Andrew Lawn quotes the British folk singer Martin Carthy as describing football chants as “the one surviving embodiment of an organic living folk tradition.”
In the same way as old folk songs were passed down through the generations, usually by word of mouth, so chants survive as people come and go.
No matter how much football is sanitised, or how much is taken away from us, chants remain something that steadfastly belong to us. They’re not only a way to feel like part of a collective, of something bigger and more important than just you, but a way to express yourself and your identity.
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And of your club’s identity too. If a set of fans has a signature song, it will define them, to one extent or another. “You’ll Never Walk Alone” has gone from a terrace song to a stirring pre-match anthem to virtually the ethos of an entire football club.
It goes beyond that, too. They can serve as an oral history of not just a club, but of what that club represents in the wider world.
“You can forget that every single person in a football crowd is also part of society,” says Lawn. “You’re an accountant or a bank manager or a teacher or unemployed and a cricket fan or a snooker fan: not one thing. You’re not [just] a football fan. Football chanting is absolutely a reflection of all of the people within it, within the crowd. It’s always going to reflect society, on a sort of macro level, but also community.
“It’s an example of a community telling its own story without having to go through journalists or authors or TV or anything else. It’s one opportunity where you can actually express yourself there and then.”
Origin story: The Greasy Chip Butty Song — Sheffield United
“Annie’s Song” by John Denver doesn’t necessarily strike you as the most sure-fire terrace banger, but Sheffield United’s spin on it — retitled “Greasy Chip Butty” — is one of the more stirring fan anthems when Bramall Lane belts it out.
It’s always played at the start of each half of Blades games, with the intro and the first line of Denver’s original played over the PA, before it drops out and the fans pick it up.
You fill up my senses
Like a gallon of Magnet
Like a packet of Woodbines
Like a good pinch of snuff
Like a night out in Sheffield
Like a greasy chip butty
Like Sheffield United
Come fill me again
As the lyrics suggest, it describes a night out in Sheffield, so its provenance would seem fairly straightforward, but no: it didn’t actually originate from Sheffield, and wasn’t even initially about Sheffield United.
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“It started with Rotherham United in the early eighties and then was sort of pinched by Sheffield United,” says Simon Thake, a BBC Sheffield presenter who made a documentary about the song last year.
Thake took a long and winding trip down the memories of South Yorkshire football, a path which eventually led him to the living room of a shy, almost reclusive Rotherham man called Terry Moran. It was he who originally wrote the lyrics for the adaptation — initially describing a night out in Masbrough, a Rotherham suburb — and began singing it in a pub called the Mail Coach. It was there that a Blades fan heard it, tweaked the lyrics and it eventually caught on in Sheffield.
Moran needed some persuading to talk about it — “I had to bring him a four pack of Guinness to tease any information out of him,” says Thake but eventually he told the tale of how the song came about, how he wrote some of the lyrics on a pub toilet wall and how he was only a little bit annoyed at its appropriation. “He was a bit annoyed about the lyrics being changed. And also when he started seeing the merchandise, the Sheffield United ‘Greasy Chip Butty’ T-shirts and tea towels.”
Where did all of this start? What was the first chant? Naturally, this sort of thing is impossible to pin down definitively, but most seem to agree that the first proper song to take hold in a football crowd — certainly the one that stuck and remains to this day — was the delightfully strange and powerfully uncool “On The Ball City”, the Norwich anthem that sounds like an elaborate practical joke played by City fans on the rest of the football world.
Kick it off, throw it in, have a little scrimmage,
Keep it low, a splendid rush, bravo, win or die;
On the ball, City, never mind the danger,
Steady on, now’s your chance,
Hurrah! We’ve scored a goal.
Originally written for a collection of works teams in the local area in the 1890s, “On The Ball City” was adopted by Norwich not long after the club was officially formed in 1902. By the 1920s it was in regular use on the terraces, and has remained pretty much untouched ever since.
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“It would never catch on now,” says Lawn, a Norwich fan, “because it’s not catchy. It’s not a tune that anyone would recognise. It’s full of words that are super obscure. But it has a kind of charm, despite being none of the things that a normal, good football chant is.”
Others may lay claim to the title. For example the composer Edward Elgar was a massive Wolves fan, and in an attempt to bring his two worlds together in the 1890s, he composed a song specifically for a favourite player, Billy Malpass. Unfortunately for him it never really caught on, and what’s more Malpass left the club in 1899, so “He Banged The Leather For Goal” became slightly redundant.
“Play Up Pompey” became attached to Portsmouth somewhere around the early part of the 20th century while “Blaydon Races”, a Geordie folk song dating from the 1860s, became intertwined with Newcastle at an indeterminate point between the wars. Various music-hall songs made appearances at games but didn’t really stick, Sheffield United fans were said to have sung an old drinking number called “Rowdy Dowdy Boys” around the turn of the century, and while nobody is really sure when “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” became West Ham’s anthem, that’s been around since its composition in 1919.
Origin story: The Chelsea celery song — Chelsea
There is a fine, if quite weird tradition of foodstuffs being thrown around at football grounds, from the cabbage chucked in Steve Bruce’s direction by some angry/surrealist Aston Villa fans, to the pig’s head lobbed towards Luis Figo by some just plain angry Barcelona supporters. You may also have spotted, if you’ve been at a few Chelsea games/events down the years, some missiles in the form of celery zipping around your head.
The origins of this are in a chant based on an old English parlour song called “Ask Old Brown To Tea”, recorded by Chas & Dave among others and supposedly introduced to the terraces by a Chelsea fan called Mickey Greenaway, who’s also credited with starting “One Man Went To Mow” and a few other old Shed favourites.
Where exactly the celery came from is less certain. There’s a theory that it stems from a self-deprecating streak in the 1980s Chelsea support, when they weren’t as successful as today, so they would sing “Celery, celery” when other fans celebrated trips to finals by singing “WEMBERLEE, WEMBERLEE”. Chelsea historian Rick Glanvill posits another theory: “The story goes that celery was picked up by some CFC fans as they approached an away ground through some allotments. This was naturally thrown around in the away end and became a thing.”
Either way, a vegetable-based tradition was born, with celery thrown at games (notably once at a baffled Cesc Fabregas in his Arsenal days) and cup celebration parades, but no more. Celery chucking has since been banned at Stamford Bridge on the premise that it could constitute a deadly projectile. A 2007 club statement solemnly said: ‘The throwing of anything at a football match, including celery, is a criminal offence for which you can be arrested and end up with a criminal record.’
If you’re a Manchester United fan, you’ll know who Pete Boyle is. If you’re not a Manchester United fan, you’ll probably know some of his work.
Up until a couple of years ago, you will have found Boyle in The Bishop Blaize, a pub just round the corner from Old Trafford, before every United game, probably standing on a table, leading the congregation in song. He’s “retired” now (“If I was 19 and there would have been a bloke standing on the table singing I might’ve thought, ‘Turn it in mate, you’re nearly 50”), but it was there that many of the best known United chants were born, most notably “Eric The King”, first sung in around 1993 about Cantona and still going strong, nearly a quarter of a century after its subject retired.
That was one of Boyle’s, adapted from a similar song sung about Denis Law in the 1960s. In 40-odd years of going to watch United, Boyle has composed and led songs about pretty much every aspect of United you can conceive of. He takes credit for popularising “Gary Neville Is A Red (He Hates Scousers)”, and also an ode to John O’Shea to the tune of “The Animals Went In Two-By-Two”, immensely popular in United circles around 2003.
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This is how chants start: in the pub, on train journeys, in the stands, outside grounds: any place that fans congregate. Boyle is a great example of what Carthy was talking about, the originator of an oral history and a certain type of folk song, passed by word of mouth around a fanbase and through generations.
Or at least, that’s how chants used to spread, but of course, the internet has changed things. Videos of Boyle singing in the pub spread the word of already established songs, but just up the road is an example of how it brought new ones to broader popularity.
Until a few years ago Jamie Webster was an electrician who played a few gigs in pubs to help pay for the costs of following Liverpool across Europe. He would appear at “Boss Night” shows organised by fans to coincide with Liverpool games, playing his interpretation of old terrace classics.
In February 2018, Webster was at Liverpool’s game in Porto when he heard a few fellow fans singing “Allez Allez Allez”, a curious song derived from a 1980s Italian disco hit called “L’Estate Sta Finendo” (“The Summer Is Ending”), which over the previous few years had been adopted by a few Italian clubs and Porto themselves. Webster, encouraged by his friends, looked up the song and played his own interpretation of it at a Boss Night show. A recording of it ended up on YouTube, and it exploded.
A week later Liverpool lost at Manchester United and their fans, as is standard, were kept in the ground for some time after the final whistle. They were singing “Allez Allez Allez” the whole time, and it became the anthem of their run to that season’s Champions League final, winning it the following year and ending their 30-year wait for a Premier League title the year after that. “That song was almost like the rebirth of Liverpool FC is a European force, in my opinion,” says Webster.
This is part of a new way that chants are disseminated, via social media and spread throughout the match-going fanbase and beyond, which has a deeper impact, according to Webster. “There are young kids who don’t have the opportunity to go to the games now because tickets are hard to come by and expensive. They get less and less opportunity to be part of that match-going culture first-hand.
“But now they’re going on YouTube, watching videos of me or people like me singing footy songs. That’s massively important for when the time does come for some of the older people to pass on the baton to the younger generation. It enables them to feel part of something without actually being there.”
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That was key during lockdown, too. Last summer a raft of players were signed by Premier League clubs, but most fans weren’t able to actually see their new recruits in the flesh until the final week of the season, and thus also not able to sing songs about them. Webster recorded a version of a song about Thiago Alcantara, set to the tune of “Cuba” by the Gibson Brothers, which was finally sung in the presence of the midfielder on the last day of the season.
Similarly, Leeds fans have a chant about Raphinha brewing. It remains to be seen which of the Edinson Cavani ditties will stick when Old Trafford is at capacity. Tragically Fulham fans never got to sing about Mario Lemina to the tune of “Tequila” by Terrorvision, the midfielder’s loan from Southampton ending before he could be serenaded.
Origin story: Away In A Manger/David Healy – Northern Ireland
Back in the 2000s, David Healy was a good-to-middling striker with various Football League clubs, but when he pulled on the green of Northern Ireland he became, quite literally, a world beater, their all-time leading goalscorer and will be for some time.
Thus, he needed a chant. A good one, too. It might have been rather confusing for opponents when Northern Ireland fans would start to sing “Away In A Manger” at seemingly inappropriate times of the year, but all became clear when, in the second line of the second verse — ‘…looked down where he lay’ — the last two words were replaced with ‘HEEEEAAALLLLLLLYYYYY’, which was then repeated. The song was adopted by Healy’s various clubs in the following years, but it would always be identified with Northern Ireland fans.
But they did not, as it turns out, come up with it, for while the chant is a slice of slightly surreal terrace genius, it’s not an original. “It first originated at Coleraine FC for the player Felix Healy, who played for the Bannsiders in the Irish League from 1980 to 1987,” explains Neal Anderson, chair of the London branch of the Northern Ireland Supporters Club. “The song disappeared for a while before finding new life again with David Healy.”
Sometimes, there really is nothing new under the sun.
Starting a chant must feel pretty good. “Part of me wanted to be a footballer,” says Boyle. “Part of me wanted to be in a cool band. Neither of those things happened, so I suppose the next best thing is singing chants about United. And I can say I’ve had 70,000 people singing my songs.”
It’s gone beyond the buzz of just hearing a song being sung at a ground, too. “Eric Cantona’s family told me Eric had seen me sing ‘Eric The King’ on YouTube. Two years ago, I did an event with him in Norway: people started singing, so I then got up and did an impromptu ‘Eric The King’. It was quite surreal seeing Eric and his brothers clapping along as I’m singing. That probably can’t be topped really.”
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It’s similar for Webster, who before the 2019 Champions League final in Madrid found himself playing to around 50,000 Liverpool fans before they beat Tottenham. He’s now a full-time musician doing his own songs: his debut album We Get By came out in 2020, and a second is due in 2022.
Even on a slightly more banal level, there’s a singular buzz to sparking off an existing song at a game. “I once started a chant at the City Ground,” says Sam, a Forest fan. “I was overjoyed. My friends sitting gave me appropriate nods of approval during the chant, and congratulations after.” Morten, a fan of Norwegian club Valerenga, says: “I started a chant at Fulham Broadway Station, as a reply to Chelsea fans before Valerenga’s defeat against Chelsea in the Cup Winners’ Cup in March 99. That got the blood rushing, to say the least.”
“I was at a Reading vs West Ham game a few years back and Lee Bowyer broke his collarbone,” says Chris. “He trudged past our end with his good arm cradling his bad one in his shirt in that sling thing they do. I jumped up and started chanting ‘Bowyer, give us a wave. Bowyer, Bowyer give us a wave….’ People joined in and had a good old chuckle. A couple of good back slaps and thumps from the adoring crowd. I don’t know what came over me but the response to it was a feeling that I still love and cringe at how badly wrong it could’ve gone if no one had joined me.”
And what about how it feels to have a song sung about you? The sight of a player first hearing their own chant and applauding the fans for it is a nourishing one. Emile Heskey titled his autobiography after the backhanded compliment of “5-1, even Heskey scored”. And it’s here’s where we remember that players and managers can be just as giddy as the rest of us about stuff like this.
The first time Carlos Carvalhal heard Sheffield Wednesday fans sing his “Carlos had a dream…” song, he was confused. “I wasn’t really sure what they were singing, but I remember I said to my assistant ‘what a beautiful song they are singing.’”
Afterwards, he went to look it up on YouTube. “I was really very proud about that. I told my friends in Portugal. When you have a song with your name, you felt really important. We don’t need this to do everything to the maximum, but they help us do things to 110 per cent. I miss the Sheffield Wednesday fans and the songs a lot.”
Origin story: The Fields of Anfield Road – Liverpool
Most people know the story of how “You’ll Never Walk Alone” became the Liverpool anthem, after Gerry and the Pacemakers’ cover of the old showtune was played at Anfield in the 1960s. But if you go to any Liverpool game you’ll hear “The Fields Of Anfield Road” sung just as much, if not more.
It originates of course from “The Fields Of Athenry”, a 1970s Irish folk song initially written by Pete St John about a man from Athenry near Galway, in the Great Famine of the 19th century. It has at various times been sung by fans of Ireland, Celtic, London Irish and Munster rugby club, and you can even find some Manchester United fans who will tell you they tried a version of it.
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But in the early 1980s Liverpool fan Eddie Williams, singer in a Merseybeat band called Eddy Falcon and the Vampires, wrote Liverpool-specific lyrics, it gradually began to take hold on the terraces and slowly developed into the anthem we know today.
All round the fields of Anfield Road
Where once we watched the King Kenny play (and could he play!)
Stevie Heighway on the wing
We had dreams and songs to sing
‘Bout the glory, round the Fields of Anfield Road
We’ve got this far and we haven’t even considered what makes a good chant.
“In the past, you had to stick to traditional songs,” says Boyle. “The best football chants were often hymns or American Civil War songs. ‘Johnny Goes Marching Home’ is a good one, or the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’, or ‘Marching Through Georgia’, or ‘When Saints Go Marching In’ — they’re all old marching, army type songs.”
Lawn has a fairly specific set of criteria: “The first thing is it has to be a tune that people know and recognize. People need to have a vague sense of where it is going. That’s also reflected in the fact that you get so many chants to the same tune: like ‘Guantanamera’, ‘Sloop John B’. It also has to be quite simple lyrically.
“I think it has to be really contextual. It has to fit the situation. The timing of it has to really work and it’s got to be funny or relevant within that to an extent that it grabs people.
“The final thing is that the atmosphere within the fans in terms of the expectation and the mood has to kind of be right. There’s no point singing a really celebratory song if something has happened within the context of the game, or within the expectations of the season is completely off.”
There is essentially no country in the world where football is popular but doesn’t have a culture of chanting. It’s different everywhere: in Germany it’s generally positive about the team, with most negativity directed at the authorities; in Italy and South America there’s a thrilling, occasionally slightly threatening intensity; in America there’s a melting pot, taking from various different fan cultures across the globe; in England, humour is used in a way it isn’t in most other places.
There is so much that divides people in football, from the simple club and national splits to serious issues like racism and xenophobia, to squabbles about VAR. But everyone chants. It’s the thing that joins us all together.
And here’s what you’ve all been waiting for: in no particular order, and excluding ones already mentioned in the piece, my choice of ten great football chants. Feel free to suggest your own in the comments, or if you’re feeling really creative, make up a new one that you think has a home on the terraces as fans return…
“We’re Not Really Here” — Manchester City
“Marching On Together” — Leeds United
“Rafa Benitez/Xabi Alonso/Pepe Reina/Fernando Torres” – Liverpool
“Will Grigg’s On Fire” — Northern Ireland
“Niall Quinn’s Disco Pants” — Sunderland
“Lenell John Lewis, His Name Is A Shop” — Bury
“Sunshine On Leith” — Hibernian
“I Had A Wheelbarrow” — Notts County
“Glad All Over” — Crystal Palace
“Delilah” — Stoke City
(Top image: Sam Richardson)
