Football

Can I kick it? The greatest football songs ever

Published on March 23, 2020

Songs written about football often have a pretty bad reputation – with even the most famous ones seeming to come with drawbacks.

But while Frank Skinner’s unique vocal stylings couldn’t impair the anthemic quality of Three Lions, there are other lesser known gems in the canon of soccer singalongs that make Fun Time Frankie sound like the dilettante he was.

Join us on an aural odyssey into the tunes that tore up the terraces – and let’s try to forget the ones that made the beautiful game sound as homely as a mule’s butt. I’m looking at you, Fat Les.

Slade – Give Us A Goal

Destined to be forever known for their contribution to Christmas-themed crooning, Noddy Holder and co had plenty of other strings to their bow. Give Us A Goal is a proper rock n roll song, almost Oasis-esque in its laddish, anthemic style.

Collapsed Lung – Eat My Goal

Fair to say this one is all about the chorus – but what a chorus. Appropriating a phrase lifted from a deathless piece of football commentary from Alan Partridge, some 25 years later I’d still rather hear this than Baddiel and Skinner’s caterwauling.

Lightning Seeds featuring Baddiel and Skinner – Three Lions

Talking of which… Sometimes you can hear something often enough to become inured to it, but I don’t think my ears will ever be able to get past the unspeakable horror that is Frank Skinner’s singing voice – and it’s clearly been gussied up by the producer too, so Christ knows how abominable the original recording sounded. Still, the tune’s inoffensive enough I suppose, and the nostalgia overload in the lyrics and the video definitely hits the spot. Fun fact – this song was a MASSIVE hit in Germany.

Chas & Dave / Spurs squad – Ossie’s Dream

Not the most sophisticated, multi-layered piece of music on the list, but the meat-and-potatoes simplicity of this one really works. Top cockney songsmiths C & D give this one their usual humour and energy to make for an all too rare footy song that manages to be bearable despite the players’ input.

Incidentally, Chas and Dave clearly had it in them to be more than just novelty song merchants – in the seventies they provided the music for Labi Siffre’s brilliant I Got The…, lifted wholesale by Eminem for his breakthrough My Name Is – check it out here!

New Order – World in Motion

Best of the lot? Against all the odds – Gazza pops up for a bit of singing, John Barnes provides a rapped interlude – this is a song that works in its own right, and would do even if the football connection didn’t exist. Thirty years on the music doesn’t seem to have dated at all to my ears, but maybe I’m not the most impartial of judges…

Blur – Song 2

Okay, so strictly speaking this isn’t a football song; that is, it’s not a song about football, per se. I mean, who know’s what it’s about? Getting your head shaved by a jumbo jet? Who cares. What matters is that football fans of a certain vintage will forever associate this two-minute blast of uproarious pop with the sights, the sounds, the mayhem of an unfolding sporting spectacle. Or, at the very least, playing the FIFA videogame.