What’s the only thing better than a really good song? A really good football song, of course.
The beautiful game has a soundtrack. Some iconic toe-tappers pay tribute to the sport through their lyrics and melodies, some are actually performed by treasured footballing heroes, and some have the power to transport you back to a specific moment in the game’s history with just a few simple notes.
From the stadium concourse to the menu of your favourite football-related video game, football songs can be heard everywhere and carry their own very special brand of nostalgia.
These are some of The Athletic’s writers’ favourite football-adjacent tunes. This list isn’t exhaustive as, frankly, we could never account for all the songs to have delighted generations of fans across the world but it’s a treasure trove of nostalgia nonetheless.
Without further adieu, let’s get started…
Curtis Mayfield — Move On Up
There is so much soulful wonder in Curtis Mayfield’s song Move On Up. When the chorus sparks, led by that feel-good trumpet at the helm, it makes you want to move.
The song radiates good energy and the late Mayfield’s vocals have enchanted so many in the past half-decade since its release. For me, it will always be connected to the 2002 movie Bend It Like Beckham as it is played over an iconic montage in the film.
The film’s plot follows Jesminder ‘Jess’ Bhamra (played by Parminder Nagra), a Punjabi Sikh teenager from London who wants to become a professional footballer.
It resonated with an entire generation of girls and women. In 2002, Jess’ dream was a dream many of us didn’t even know we could have. In that way, her dream, fictional as it was, became ours too.
At home, we rewound that VHS tape over and over again to live through it with her at a time when women’s football lacked the visibility we are relishing today. Stick on Move On Up at a packed-out stadium before a women’s football match today and so many in the crowd will know exactly what it means.
Caoimhe O’Neill
Sunshine On Leith — The Proclaimers
Whenever I am feeling slightly disconnected from football, whether that’s my own team losing, another small side being swallowed into a multi-club group or some post-match analysis starting with, “We have to start with the penalty decision: did the referee get it right, Jamie?”, I reach for a favourite YouTube clip.
It’s from the 2007 Scottish League Cup final. Hibernian have beaten Kilmarnock, 5-1, and their players are celebrating on the pitch at Hampden Park. In the stands, there’s that curious post-final situation where exactly half the ground is empty and half is full, and the victorious fans that remain are belting out the unofficial Hibs anthem, Sunshine On Leith by the Proclaimers.
Hibs manager John Collins is pacing around the pitch, his face halfway between a smile and tears. The BBC coverage essentially stops so the viewers can fully take it all in.
It’s astonishingly powerful; a local anthem written by local boys, and perhaps the most remarkable thing about it as a football song is that it absolutely shouldn’t work as a football song. It’s slow, it requires the singer to belt out the word ‘sorrow’ four times in a row and it takes 90 seconds to reach the chorus.
But it works because it’s about hope. It’s about being devastated and then getting saved by love. It’s about being welcomed and being safe. And that’s what football can be about, too.
Nick Miller
Longtime readers may expect me to select from the Los Campesinos! discography, as I once interviewed frontman Gareth Paisey about his knack for referencing football in the band’s lyrics. It takes a keen wordsmith to seamlessly compare real-world heartache to xG, Bela Guttmann and catenaccio.
Instead, I found a different type of punkish rock ballad stuck in my head as I sifted through my options: Total Football by New York rock band Parquet Courts.
The opener from their 2018 album Wide Awake!, Total Football keeps Johan Cruyff, Rinus Michels and company at heart as they talk about the decline of the 1990s’ self-aggrandizing machismo and a restored hope for collectivism.
“It’s about people’s desire to be together and stand for something ideologically,” vocalist Andrew Savage told the NME in 2018. It’s an excellent tune that clips along at a scintillating pace — and the final line is bound to resonate with the most cynical of Birmingham City fans.
Jeff Rueter
Freed from Desire — Gala
I liked Freed from Desire the first time around in 1996, when it was merely a catchy Eurodance song for an innocent 11-year-old lad from Wolverhampton to vigorously tap his foot to.
Twenty years later, when the song came back from the dead because of Will Grigg’s ability to score goals for Wigan Athletic, my response was a Gallic-esque shrug.
But Freed from Desire’s refusal to exit the football zeitgeist over the ensuing eight years and counting has gradually worn me down to the extent I believe its status as the football anthem of a generation, a continent, nay, even the world, is entirely just.
At the European Championship back in the summer, it was everywhere. Pre-match, post-match, after goals, in stadiums, in bars, in the street; fans of most nations needed no encouragement to jump up and down singing, ‘Na na na na na na na na na na na na na’. It was endearing and pretty joyous.
Ditto at Brentford the other weekend, after they beat Bournemouth. It’s everywhere.
Its popularity endures and, having interviewed Gala in June, when she told me Freed from Desire’s success felt like justice after she was screwed by the music industry and effectively blacklisted for years (making hardly any money from the song), that makes it one of football’s happier outcomes.
Tim Spiers
Bellini — Samba de Janeiro
Typically, ‘goal music’ is something I’d have no problems consigning to extinction in football’s Room 101. Still, something about Samba de Janeiro, the dance song played every time the net bulged at the 2008 European Championship, brings me so much joy every time I hear it.
While I remember bits of the 2006 World Cup, Euro 2008 was the first international tournament to make a long-lasting imprint on my mind. When I think back to the sofa in my grandma’s house, where I sat for hours watching every minute of every game (a joy/burden I try to maintain into my twenties), I see Andrey Arshavin, Colin Kazim-Richards and Marcos Senna, and I hear Samba de Janeiro.
I last heard it in a bar on Birmingham’s Broad Street. If any of our party at the time didn’t know how much I love that song before, I’d hazard they all do now.
Elias Burke
Jorge Ben — Fio Maravilha
Many of Brazil’s greatest musicians have looked towards football for inspiration. Take the song O Futebol, in which Chico Buarque dreams about unleashing a shot “with the precision of an arrow” or Gilberto Gil’s Meio de Campo (‘Midfield’), an ode to iconoclastic Botafogo player Afonsinho.
The most celebrated entry in the canon, however, is Jorge Ben’s 1972 hit Fio Maravilha — a nimble, sashaying tribute to the Flamengo striker of the same name. The song’s refrain — “Fio Maravilha, we score another one for us” — remains a highlight of Jorge Ben’s live show over half a century later.
The song wasn’t just an artistic triumph, however; it also sparked a feud for the ages. It forced Jorge Ben, one of his country’s great lyricists, into a hasty rewrite and left a bitter taste in his mouth. It turned Fio Maravilha from a folk hero into a pariah. The full story is here.
Jack Lang
Hemp To the Left — Abi Paterson
This is a sad tale of a failed attempt to break the Gala monotony.
Come with me back to summer 2022, and the legendary, unforgettable Women’s European Championship.
Sarina Wiegman had taken over the Lionesses and frankly, nothing was going to stop England reaching their ultimate goal. I took it upon myself to create a chant. A song that would stay with us and be an audible totem for us to think back on as England knocked the competition aside on their way to lifting the trophy.
Alas, I did not make such a moment. I didn’t go viral and wasn’t even considered mildly infectious.
The song follows the tune of Instruction by Jax Jones, Demi Lovato and Stefflon Don, and my adapted chorus went like this:
Hemp to the left
Mead to the right
Ellen’s up front
Millie’s looking bright
They don’t need introduction
Follow Sarina’s instruction.
While tactically accurate, it falls down on its complexity.
But perhaps now you have read this, you too can think back to that momentous occasion and instead of singing “Beth Mead’s on fire…”, you might like to score your thoughts to this tune instead.
Need an England song for #WEURO2022? 🏴
Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered 🤝
🎶 @abipaterson pic.twitter.com/WgFGXh1yHb
— The Athletic | Football (@TheAthleticFC) July 11, 2022
Abi Paterson
The White Stripes — Seven Nation Army
I could tell you this song is a 2003 single by The White Stripes, that in 2021 Rolling Stone magazine ranked it 36th on its top 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, or that it resembles Bruckner’s Symphony No 5.
But it wouldn’t be as blisteringly evocative as the famous guitar riff itself, the distinctive and memorable ‘Daaaa, da da da da daaaa daaaa’ that has helped Seven Nation Army permeate cultural consciousness, including and especially within football.
Belgium’s Club Brugge fans were the first known side to adopt it in a sports context before a Champions League match away against Milan in 2003, then Italy’s national team adopted it, and on and on it went until today where it’s a touchstone among sporting chants, used to serenade luminaries including Kevin De Bruyne and former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Jack White’s response? “Nothing is more beautiful in music than when people embrace a melody and allow it to enter the pantheon of folk music.”
Max Mathews
Deuce — Don’t Tread
Football anthems are a dime a dozen — but how many of them are written and performed by players? And how many are written and performed by a country’s greatest ever men’s player? Such is the case with Don’t Tread, the creation of former USMNT forward Clint Dempsey.
In 2006, the hype surrounding the U.S. men’s national team was real. Up to sixth in FIFA’s (comically flawed) global rankings system, everyday Americans were finally starting to take note of the USMNT and the team’s equipment sponsor, Nike, wanted to take advantage of that. It tapped Dempsey, one of the team’s young upstarts, to write and record a fight song of sorts for the team, and the former Fulham man did not let them down.
Dempsey recruited Houston-area rapper Big Hawk to help him with the track and Nike sent a film crew to Dempsey’s tiny hometown of Nacogdoches, Texas, to record a music video to accompany it. The end result does a wonderful job of illustrating just how humble Dempsey’s roots are — portions of it were shot in the trailer park he grew up living in.
I listened to Don’t Tread about a thousand times while writing an exhaustive feature on it and was actually shocked at how well it holds up. No American soccer fan who lived through the build-up to that World Cup in Germany — and the USMNT’s catastrophic performance in the tournament itself — will ever forget Deuce’s rallying cry: Don’t. Tread. On. This.
Pablo Maurer
This Time (We’ll Get it Right) — The England World Cup Squad
Growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the charts seemed awash with football team sing-a-longs whenever a cup final came around or England actually qualified for a tournament.
And they were sung by the actual players too, often bedecked with natty knitwear and club scarves. Imagine Harry Kane, Cole Palmer and Jude Bellingham stepping up to the mic these days!
Neither could you imagine England qualifying for a World Cup for the first time in 12 years but in 1982, there was huge anticipation after Ron Greenwood’s men finally booked a spot at the biggest football festival in the world, hosted by Spain in ’82, having missed out in both 1974 and 1978.
Unfortunately, they sang This Time (We’ll Get it Right) — but as usual, they never quite did.
Despite beating France, Czechoslovakia and Kuwait in the opening group round, England typically went out on a bum note, still unbeaten, after goalless draws with West Germany and the hosts in a second, eight-team group stage which decided the semi-finalists.
Rob Tanner
Love Me Again — John Newman
European football’s popularity has increased massively in India over the past decade but with the best football leagues happening so far away, the FIFA video game series was crucial in helping me, and I’m sure several others, learn about the greatest clubs in the world before this boom.
FIFA 14 is one of the series’ best releases, and its soundtrack was arguably the best of the lot, too.
Most may not know many other John Newman songs but will instantly recognise Love Me Again when the opening line, “Know I’ve done wrong, left your heart torn…” starts blaring out of the speakers.
The song is what I associate firstly with the FIFA games. It also brings back memories of simpler times when we still had the Barclays Premier League and Liga BBVA, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo at their peaks, and relatively limited Twitter/X football discourse. A special mention to The Nights by Avicii too.
Having listened to both songs time and again while changing my team’s formation and tactics on Career Mode, I’m sure I’d get most of the lyrics right in the karaoke room, too.
Anantaajith Raghuraman
Aviccii — Levels
This is an entirely indulgent choice. Sue me.
Back in 2012, Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian were headed for the biggest Edinburgh derby of all time in the Scottish Cup final. Truth be told, neither team were particularly stellar but Hibs (as per) were scraping the barrel to a greater extent.
For some reason — and these things often happen unintentionally — Avicii’s Levels became the soundtrack to Hearts’ run to the final and their 5-1 demolition job of Hibs in that final. Being a Hearts fan, and only 31 years old at the time, it was a strange sensation at the end of that game realising I’d just seen the best win of my life. There’s very little chance of anything topping it.
So, tidy memories whenever Levels plays and it will always have that association for those of us who care. For those who don’t, it’s just a rock-solid dance track — and there’s no harm in that.
Phil Hay
Put ’Em Under Pressure — Republic of Ireland Football Squad
“We’ve qualified for the World Cup, go and compete.”
Hearing those words, spoken in a gruff North of England accent, most Irish people over 40 will immediately start to hum a super-catchy guitar riff inspired by Celtic rockers Horslips.
It’s the opening to Put ’Em Under Pressure, a song released in 1990 when the Republic of Ireland played in their first ever World Cup finals.
Produced by U2’s Larry Mullen, the song samples manager Jack Charlton (said gruff Englishman) as well as supporters chanting, “Olé, olé, olé…”
A super sing-along chorus (cheekily borrowed from Scotland’s 1978 World Cup song) includes the line, “We’ll really shake them up, when we win the World Cup.” Ireland, of course, did not win that World Cup, but that was not really the point. The whole thing made a huge impression, especially on one 11-year-old in Kildare.
The song got lots more airplay when Charlton died in 2020, and it’s still great.
Dermot Corrigan
This song feels directly tied to the most celebrated aspects of Brazilian football — its flair and elegance.
You might not hear it in a nightclub but it has a smooth feel to it, typical of Sergio Mendes’ samba and bossa nova tracks.
Mendes released his first version in 1966 alongside the band Brasil 66, but the original was recorded by Jorge Ben in 1963. Its association with the Brazilian national team was popularised from its use in the famous Nike 1998 World Cup advert where the squad dribbled their way through an airport.
It even became a hit again in 2006 after being re-recorded with the Black Eyed Peas, peaking at No 6 in the UK singles chart.
Mendes was a Grammy-winning Brazilian artist and died in September after a legendary music career that included collaborating with Pele on a soundtrack for a documentary about the football icon in 1977.
Eduardo Tansley
Head Over Heels in Love — Kevin Keegan
Footballers performing their own pop songs doesn’t happen quite so much these days: they’re plenty famous already, they can make some extra money just by staring moodily down a camera lens for a sportswear company, they have enough advisers to talk them out of anything too foolish.
But it used to be a pretty regular thing and the instinct is to write them all off as crap novelty tunes. And, to be fair, a huge amount of them are: Andy Cole’s Outstanding springs to mind, as does Johan Cruyff’s oompa number called (and I promise I’m not making this up) Oei, Oei, Oei (Dat Was Me Weer Een Loei).
But then there are some that get chucked into the pile despite, I am here to tell you, actually being bangers.
Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle’s Diamond Lights, for example: much derided, but really, genuinely good. And then there’s Kevin Keegan’s Head Over Heels in Love: a loveable slice of 1970s pop that couldn’t be more of its time if it was wearing a cheesecloth shirt and driving a Ford Capri. But if it was by a more ‘credible’ artist, people wouldn’t mock it. Justice for Kevin!
Nick Miller
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Meech Robinson)
