There’s music in football: as we approach the men’s Euro 2024 in Germany, we take a look at football songs, some dodgy and some successful, and the stories behind them.
By Hendrik Nolde
The heated debate about Major Tom as a possible goal song for the German national team recently underscored once again that you can’t view football and music as “completely separate” from each other – in fact they are closely connected. On the terraces of large stadiums worldwide, supporters in their tens of thousands strike up chants together every week, and it’s rare for professional footballers to venture out in public nowadays without musical accompaniment in the form of huge headphones. Musical history also includes plenty of songs dedicated to football in all its guises, which are not uncommonly featured at major tournaments such as the European Championship. Music can be used as a declaration of love for the people's sport of football, or alternatively it can serve to condemn unacceptable situations such as homophobia in football. In the best-case scenario, football songs successfully convey the emotions of the game – but at its worst this entails creation of irrelevant pseudo-anthems, which end up being blared to death in order to flesh out the media coverage.
When the football pros reach for the microphone, it’s understandable and appropriate that people are sceptical. After all, not every libero is a talented tenor too. However the German men’s first team have been undeterred by this in the past and for decades they have simply recorded their own theme songs to major championships. This trend was started by the team surrounding Franz Beckenbauer and Gerd Müller for the 1974 World Cup. The subsequent world champions, wearing their kit of course, are “singing” an awkward Schlager-style rendition of
Fußball ist unser Leben (football is our life) from their crib sheets. Four years later, using precisely the same recipe for success, they even topped the German charts
in collaboration with Udo Jürgens. Unfortunately the 1986 song
Mexico Mi Amor was not able to replicate this success – even though they had dressed Lothar Matthäus and Pierre Littbarski in sombreros especially to convey a Latin-American
joie de vivre. But unsurprisingly the peak of absurdity came in the 1990s. For the USA World Cup, Jürgen Klinsmann & Co belted out
Far Away in America ebulliently into the cameras – accompanied by none other than the disco band famous for their flamboyant costumes, Village People. Apparently the bigwigs at the DFB were of the opinion that this pop treasure had become unsurpassable from then on – at any rate, the German national squad has not released any further songs since.
More often than giving their own vocal cords a work-out, other people are of course singing the footballers’ praises. Such musical homage is mostly restricted to the full-throated chants of fans in the stadium. Karl-Heinz Rummenigge had a different experience though. The European champion of 1980 and later chairman of FC Bayern München received an unusual tribute. British couple Alan & Denise netted a chart success in 1983 with their anthem to the German centre-forward’s “sexy knees”. The song was inspired not just by the skimpy shorts characteristic of the song’s star, but also by the exclamation of an English commentator who yelled “Rummenigge, what a man!” after he scored a goal. The German surname sounded strange to English ears, which might also have played a role – as the pop duo admitted later in an interview with
11Freunde. Rummenigge himself was said to have been sceptical at first but changed his mind about the song because his wife liked it. But Alan & Denise were unable to capitalise on their one-hit wonder: the follow-up single
Beckenbauer, Beckenbauer was a dust-gatherer.
When the English Football Association asked comedians Frank Skinner and David Baddiel to join forces with rock band The Lightning Seeds to produce a song for Euro 96 in their own country, the officials likely didn’t realise that they had just commissioned possibly the best football song of all time.
Three Lions hooked into the Britpop sound then at the peak of its popularity –
(What's the Story) Morning Glory? by Oasis had just become one of the top-selling albums in British history. The lyrics play with the emotions evoked by international football. The catchy line “it’s coming home” harks back to the origins of the modern game in England and references moments of glory during English football history. At the same time – in line with the British sense of humour – it self-mockingly addresses England’s lack of success: “thirty years of hurt” refers to the national team’s barren period after winning the 1966 World Cup, another tournament on home turf.
With this mix, the song became not only an absolute megahit, but also the unofficial anthem of English football. Jürgen Klinsmann later admitted that the song was playing before the Euros in the German changing-room as well. Logically so, since the team hadn’t recorded a song of their own! Might Klinsmann & Co. have struck up a chorus of “football’s coming home” before the semi-final in which England’s dream of winning the title in their own country was shattered by the penalty shoot-out against Germany? In any case, this sporting tragedy did nothing to stop the enduring popularity of the song. Failure was averted musically in the end, and the core message of unbroken faith in the return of victory was easily postponed for a couple more years. A
new recording for the 1998 World Cup, dealing with their knock-out by Germany two years earlier, raced to the top of the charts again, and its chorus can still be heard regularly on stadium terraces in England today. A late revenge finally occurred in summer 2022, after what was by then almost 50 years of pain. After England’s national women’s team won the Euro final – against Germany of course – the Lightning Seeds joined forces with a number of former Lionesses to play
a version of the song that commemorated this victory. The vocal performance of England’s women was every bit as good as the German boys’ choir of the 1970s.
