England Songs and Famous Chants: From Three Lions to Sweet Caroline
Supporting the national team is a slightly peculiar pursuit at the best of times. England fans turn up in numbers that few other countries can match and they bring with them a songbook that is part patriotic standard, part novelty pop record, part beery terrace tune and part stuff the Football Association would dearly love to never hear sung in a stadium again. Tournament summers shape this in a way that the weekly grind of the Premier League never quite does. The mood of the country bleeds into what gets sung at Wembley and in whichever fan zone the team’s supporters have descended on this time round.
It is also fair to say that some football supporters are more readily able to get behind the national team than others. For many fans of Premier League teams, it is hard to hate players of the likes of Manchester United, Tottenham Hotspur and Arsenal one week, only to then get behind them as soon as they pull on the England shirt. The cognitive dissonance needed to support the Three Lions is too much for a lot of people to bear, to say nothing of the fact that the majority of the country spends their spare time being abusive towards the city of Liverpool and Scousers in general, only to then wonder why people from there don’t support England.
For those that do love the national side, however, there is a desire to get behind them as much as possible. Of course, the combination of the lack of success alongside the scarcity of matches during the course of the year means that it isn’t always easy for fans to find something to sing about that everyone can agree on. It is worth pointing out that a lot of the songs are generic ones, which have stood the test of time but that aren’t necessarily specific when it comes to singing about the people on the pitch, representing their country. It is all about making noise and adding an atmosphere to proceedings as best the supporters can.
What follows isn’t intended to be the complete songbook, because no such list could ever exist. We have stuck to the songs that have outlived a single tournament cycle, with a couple of the more contentious ones flagged for exactly what they are. There are plenty of terrace-only chants that exist purely to wind up Scotland or Germany and most of those won’t get much airtime here, although one or two have crept in because English football crowds seem incapable of stopping themselves. Still, if you think you have heard a song that isn’t on this list, then you almost certainly will have done so.
Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home)
If England have an anthem in the modern era, this is it. Three Lions was released in the May of 1996 to coincide with the country hosting the European Championship and was the work of comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner with Lightning Seeds frontman Ian Broudie writing the tune.
It went straight to number one, got re-recorded for the 1998 World Cup and was re-released for 2018 and 2021 for good measure, hitting the top spot all over again on each occasion.
The ‘It’s coming home’ line has long since outgrown the song that spawned it. You will hear it sung in pubs and supermarkets and when something good is actually happening on the pitch.
The melancholic verses about thirty years of hurt are probably the reason the song landed in the first place, becoming an ode to disappointment dressed up as a celebration, which is just about the most English thing imaginable. The tendency of opposition supporters to weaponise it as a taunt whenever England lose a tournament has done nothing to dampen enthusiasm for the original. The bit fans use in the ground is the short version, repeated until it merges into a single unbroken noise:
It’s coming home,
It’s coming home,
It’s coming,
Football’s coming home!
God Save the King
The national anthem has its own complications. Until 2022, it was God Save the Queen and even now plenty of supporters in the fanbase sing the old version out of pure habit before realising and correcting themselves.
It gets played before kick-off at every England match, home or away, and is largely sung with more conviction than tunefulness. Republican-minded fans tend to take the moment to study their shoelaces, whilst those of a certain disposition will even consider booing it. The song dates from the mid-eighteenth century and no one author has ever been properly credited.
That seems about right for a piece of music nobody seems to entirely agree on the meaning of. Even the most staunch of lover of the Royal Family and the idea of a monarchy must be aware of the fact that it is quite an odd song to sing, especially in an era when fewer and fewer people believe in ‘god’ as a concept. Add in the fact that we’re essentially singing to ask such a deity to ‘reign over us’ indefinitely and you can see why it is that some people find it quite a difficult one to sing. Still, if England are playing well, then it might get a run-out towards the end of the game, having already been sung before a ball is kicked.
This is the verse that is sung most often:
God save our gracious King,
Long live our noble King,
God save the King.
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the King.
Ten German Bombers
We’ll be straight about this one: It probably shouldn’t really be on the list. Set to the melody and structure of She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain, using a count-down children’s song about World War Two bombers being shot out of the sky by the RAF, Ten German Bombers is the chant the FA spends every other tournament cycle pleading with supporters to retire. Both UEFA and the FA banned the song at Euro 2020 and threatened fans with stadium bans for singing it. Predictably enough, though, it could still be heard at England fixtures across the years that followed.
There is a defence to be made that it is just a daft song about something that happened eighty years ago, but that is one that isn’t easy to make with a straight face. That is because there is also a strong case that singing about killing Germans in 2026 is not really a hill anybody needs to die on. When Thomas Tuchel became England manager, the idea of singing an anti-German song became even more ludicrous. That being said, it isn’t exactly unusual for football fans to sing or do something that makes them look a bit ridiculous, so why should they be expected to stop with a German in the dugout?
The verse format is straightforward:
There were ten German bombers in the air,
There were ten German bombers in the air!
There were ten German bombers,
Ten German bombers,
Ten German bombers in the air!
And the RAF from England shot one down…
Etc.
No Surrender
Another one with a serious problem attached to it. The tune is taken from a Wesleyan hymn called Give Me Oil in My Lamp and the verse opens with ‘With St George in my heart, keep me English’. The contentious section is the chorus, which is the bit that made it onto the terraces in volume. The slogan itself goes back to the 1689 Siege of Derry and has long been a fixture of Ulster Loyalism, before being picked up by English football fans some time after the Heysel ban in 1985. The FA has publicly disowned the chant on more than one occasion, England managers have addressed it in pre-match press conferences, and yet it has stubbornly refused to die.
Some of the supporters who still belt it out claim it is purely an anti-terrorism statement, which is generous to themselves and not especially convincing to anyone listening from the other side of the Irish Sea. It is most often tacked onto the end of God Save the King, with the following being the part that fans tend to sing:
No surrender,
No surrender,
No surrender to the IRA!
Sweet Caroline
If you had told an England fan watching Vindaloo on Top of the Pops in 1998 that the defining tournament singalong of the late 2020s would be a 1969 Neil Diamond song, you would have been politely shown the door. Sweet Caroline got picked up properly during Euro 2020, when delayed-by-Covid Wembley crowds latched onto it after games, and it has been impossible to shift since. The Boston Red Sox have been singing it for decades and several other clubs and country teams have their own versions, but the English rendition has its own particular habit of multiplying the volume on the ‘bah bah bah’ bits to a point where you can hear it three streets away from the ground.
Neil Diamond himself recorded a video message thanking England supporters during the run to the Euro 2020 final, which gives some idea of how thoroughly the song has been claimed. It gets a run-out after wins, after draws and even occasionally after defeats, more out of stubbornness than anything else, and any tournament summer from here on is going to involve a great deal of it, whether the country particularly wants that or not. It is a song that really began to find its feet during various darts tournaments over the years, so it was always likely to make it onto the terraces given the crossover in fans of both.
Here is the bit that supporters get most excited singing:
Sweet Caroline,
(Bah bah bah)
Good times never seemed so good,
(So good, so good, so good!)