The art of the chant

But the songs and chants at football matches are often an accurate way to gauge the feelings of the crowd, as well as what’s happening on the pitch. A new documentary in Radio 4’s Archive On 4 series, Here We Go! The Art of the Football Chant, digs deep into the past 75 years of terrace singing to understand how, and why, this happens. “We start off with the idea of the crowd as a 12th man,” said Les Back, the show’s presenter.

“Players talk about it very powerfully and interestingly, about what it does to them as athletes, when they walk into that kind of atmosphere. But what does the singing do for those who bring the 12th man to life? What does it do for the fans? Why is it important? Why is it precious?”

Back, a sociology professor who has written about football culture for decades, travelled to football grounds across the UK during the 2024-25 season, recording the songs and speaking to fans and players about their experiences of matchday singing.

The chants and reminiscences are teamed with fascinating and rarely heard extracts from the BBC archive, going back to a 1964 edition of Panorama which visited a full-throated Kop at Anfield.

The result is insightful and evocative, and puts forward the idea that football songs are a type of folk music. It makes Back like a 21st-­century equivalent of Cecil Sharp, who collected the lyrics and melodies of about 4,000 folk songs in Victorian and Edwardian England, which eventually led to the British folk revival.

However, modern methods make recording history simpler: the website FanChants has a database of 27,000 songs, mostly submitted by users.Dulwich Hamlet Women’s ­centre-half Ceylon Andi Hickman tells Back about chants only sung to her team, not the men’s side, and what that means to her and team-mates.

In a moving archive clip, Harry Gregg, the Manchester United and Northern Ireland goalkeeper who dragged fellow passengers, including Bobby Charlton, out of the wreckage at Munich, recalls how he only had a couple of months of reverent respect from fans before they started urging him to “go back to Ireland”.

“Human beings,” Gregg told Melvyn Bragg in 1974, “are funny people.”

Football fans can be genuinely laugh-out-loud funny – particularly when their team has a player whose name rhymes or scans perfectly into a well-known lyric: “When you’re sat in row Z/and the ball hits your head /that’s Zamora”, to the tune of That’s Amore mocked former Fulham and Brighton striker Bobby Zamora.

As Back knows from many years of watching his local team Millwall, when its fans had a reputation for being, as he puts it, “hooligans and racists”, supporters’ words can be awful, hurtful and sometimes criminal.

He talks to Tony Witter, a black Millwall player who recalls the abuse from fans in the 90s, but also their love, expressed in his own song: Walking in a Witter wonderland.

Witter’s paradoxical experience is, for Back, a touchstone of football culture and understanding the change is important.

In Glasgow, Back meets a couple, Joan and Davie, who support Celtic and Rangers respectively. (The way they deal with their football rivalry is to never, ever acknowledge it in each other’s presence. Going to an Old Firm derby early in their relationship nearly ended it.)

Davie remembers a song sung for the former Rangers centre-half Madjid Bougherra, an Algerian Muslim: “He’s six foot three / he’s got a tan / he doesn’t eat for Ramadan.”

“That’s incredible to me,” says Back.

“It would have been unthinkable in the 70s, 80s or 90s, that a Muslim player would be celebrated, and it was ordinary.

“It doesn’t mean Islamophobia doesn’t exist – of course it does – but it says something about the ­opening up of the popular ­consciousness to difference, which I think is not insignificant.”

Like Liverpool fans singing about Mo Salah as “a gift from Allah” ­(melody: You Are My Sunshine), there is much to be thankful for.

Archive on 4: Here We Go! The Art Of The Football Chant is on Radio 4 at 8pm on 14 June, and then on BBC iPlayer

Photographs by Howard Walker/Getty Images, Mirrorpix