I dreamed of having a No 1. With Three Lions. I had four. Now it’s time to pass the ball

Three Lions, the football song written and performed by Ian Broudie, David Baddiel and myself, was first released 30 years ago this month. It used to be my ringtone, until it went off during a Roman Catholic mass I was attending. Having thus been exposed as guilty of the sin of pride, I changed it to New Order’s World in Motion as penance. The day the song first went to No 1, I was checking into a New York hotel. When I got to my room, there was a large bunch of flowers from my manager and a card that said: “Straight in at Number One. 56,000 units sold.” I was a music-mad kid who had sung in several awful bands and, yes, I’d daydreamed about having a No 1 record, but I have to say, the use of the word “units” did suck some of the romance out of it.

Pretty soon, the song was everywhere, and continues to regularly turn up in unlikely contexts. I was with my girlfriend, now my wife, at a country house hotel in Warwickshire, when a group of lads drinking at the hotel bar managed to find out what room we were staying in. They ended up around midnight gathered below our window, singing with some gusto, “He’s having sex. He’s having sex. He’s having. Skinner’s having sex.” Still, it turned out to be a more novel way of bringing up the subject than my usual, slightly unfortunate habit of just smiling and rubbing my hands together.

As more tournaments came and went, we unashamedly re-released the song, often with updated lyrics, including, in 2022, a Christmas version to coincide with the Qatar World Cup. Fifa had moved that tournament to November-December so fans wouldn’t have to attend games under the blazing Qatari sun, and in so doing denied New Order any chance of following our lyric-changing lead by releasing World in Lotion.

Three Lions has generated a lot of love over the years, but its success has always been firmly tied to the performance of the team. I received a parcel a few years back containing two framed Guinness World Records certificates. One was for having four No 1s with the same song and the other for having the biggest drop from No 1 in a week: a very apt 96 places. All the fickleness of show business, in one big jiffy bag.

I’m told that Fifa is, nowadays, keen to focus on its official tournament song, rather than a series of songs from individual countries: a global anthem for its global entertainment product. I’m also told that the FA has chosen to distance itself from Three Lions because the suggestion that England is the home of football has led to some embarrassing prawn-sandwich-fuelled chats with representatives of other football associations, who view the claim as elitist. England spawned the first football association, the first standardised laws of the game, the first official football league and the first official football cup competition. Our claim to the title is, admittedly, largely admin-based but it seems a sturdier origin story than someone kicking a severed head on a 14th-century battlefield. The FA happily designates Wembley Stadium the Home of Legends. I wonder what the Loch Ness monster thinks about that.

The go-to, non-controversial replacement for Three Lions is Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, a song unceremoniously wrenched from the repertoire of the Northern Ireland supporters and also now the soundtrack for a hilarious Hellmann’s mayonnaise advert, in which a character called Meal Diamond sings the song with a a new lyrical hook: “Sweet sandwich time.” I feel the FA will now be distancing itself from the song, anxious that it might offend its official sandwich partner, which is, one imagines, part of a triumvirate with its official snack and soft drink partners, together constituting the FA’s corporate meal deal.

It’s insane but I’ve been No 1 in the UK singles charts more times than David Bowie, Queen, Bob Dylan or the Who. Despite all my other work, I’ll probably end up just being known for one thing, like Dr Crippen or Celia Imrie. The sad side-effect of all this is that Three Lions has been such a success that the long “official England song” tradition seems to have been discontinued. That makes me sad. The first single I ever bought was Back Home, sung by the 1970 England squad. If Three Lions is being cancelled, we need a replacement. What a beautiful example of a phoenix rising from the ashes it would be if England adopted our failed Eurovision entry for this World Cup. Imagine Thomas Tuchel’s face as the England fans raise the rafters with a fervent, if slightly ironic, Eins, Zwei, Drei.

Photograph by PA/Alamy