Lincoln City Songs & Chants: From the Lincolnshire Poacher to We’ve Conquered All of League One

Lincoln City spent the summer of 2026 getting used to a new view. After running away with the League One title on 103 points, unbeaten across a 29-game stretch and a full 12 clear of Cardiff City, the Imps landed back in the second tier of English football for the first time in 65 years. The manager who took them up, Michael Skubala, was gone almost before the open-top bus had cooled down, off to Bristol City and replaced by his own assistants Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw, but the songbook stayed exactly where it was. That songbook is worth writing about.

Lincoln have more of their own material than most clubs their size. What follows is not the complete Lincoln songbook, since no such thing exists at any football club, truth be told. We have tried to stick to the songs the crowd actually sing at Sincil Bank and, as far as we’ve been able to, to the ones that belong to Lincoln rather than the identikit chants every club shares with a name swapped in. The ground has changed its sponsored name more than once in recent years and will keep doing so, but the fans still call it Sincil Bank, and that is the name that turns up in the songs.

There is one borrowed melody in here, an Elvis number, and it has earned its place because the crowd has bent it into a shape nobody else uses. If you think you’ve seen the Imps play and heard a particular song being sung, then you will almost certainly be right, so don’t judge us too harshly. Rather than trying to nail every song that Lincoln City fans have ever sung, we’re instead looking to give you a taste of the kinds of things that supporters are likely to belt out as they try to add an atmosphere to the match that they’re sat they’re watching.

The Lincolnshire Poacher

Before you get to any single chant, you have to deal with the Poacher, because it sits underneath everything else at Lincoln. The Lincolnshire Poacher isn’t a reference to a decent goalscorer who plays for the Imps. Instead, it is an old folk song that the county has adopted as its unofficial anthem, a cheerful bit of rural mischief about a lad who would rather take his chances in the moonlight than serve out his apprenticeship. Lincoln City took the idea and ran with it, so the club mascot has been Poacher the Imp since 1999 and supporters happily wear the Poacher label as a badge of where they are from.

It is the sort of thing that binds a club to its patch, a county song doing the same job for Lincoln that a bit of borrowed pop does for everyone else. The tune long predates the football club and its opening is the bit everyone in Lincolnshire knows, given the fact that they will almost certainly have been hearing it throughout their life in one form or another. Although it isn’t exactly one that the club’s supporters belt out on a match day, it’s still a valid one to have on the list on account of the ties between the football club and the area in which it plays its matches.

Here is that opening:

When I was bound apprentice in famous Lincolnshire,

Full well I served my master for more than seven year.

We Are Imps

The nickname is the other half of the Lincoln City identity and it comes with a story no other club can borrow. High up on a wall inside Lincoln Cathedral sits a small stone grotesque known as the Lincoln Imp. The legend has it that the Devil sent a pair of imps out to cause trouble, one of which blew into the Cathedral and started smashing the place up until an angel told it to stop. The imp is supposed to have shouted back that they could stop it if they could catch it, at which point it was turned to stone on the spot.

That imp is on the club crest, it is the symbol of the city and it is the root of the chant the crowd falls back on when they simply want to state who they are. It provides a decent atmosphere for Lincoln games, not least of all because of that sense of identity that is so important to a football club and its supporters. There is no other football team nicknamed the Imps, at least not in England, so it isn’t exactly a surprise that the fans would want to draw attention to it. The chant isn’t exactly the most original and awe-inspiring, but still. Here’s how it goes:

We are Imps,

We are Imps!

We’re the Co-op, Sincil Bank, Stacey West

This is the one that could really only ever belong to Lincoln City, because it is built entirely out of their own ground. The crowd works its way round Sincil Bank stand by stand, naming the ends back to each other until the whole place has answered. There is nothing generic about a chant assembled from the names above your own turnstiles. What gives it real weight is the Stacey West Stand itself. It is named after Bill Stacey and Jim West, two lifelong Lincoln supporters who were among the fifty-six people killed in the Bradford City fire at Valley Parade on 11 May 1985.

That was a match that the Imps were playing in that day. Every time the away end sings its own stand’s name, it is keeping those two men in the ground in a way that is much more real and relevant than simply naming a stand in their honour. Whilst that is obviously the right thing for the club to do, the supporters honouring the men in their own way is, in many ways, equally as important. The chant is silly, but that moment is one that will always have its own weight. This is what gets chanted around the stadium:

We’re the Co-op, we’re the Co-op, we’re the Co-op, Sincil Bank!

We’re the left side, we’re the left side, we’re the left side, Stacey West!

We’re the right side, we’re the right side, we’re the right side, Stacey West!

Can’t Help Falling in Love

Here is the borrowed tune, and Lincoln get away with it because of what they do at the end. The crowd takes the old Elvis Presley ballad Can’t Help Falling in Love and sings it more or less straight, the whole slow, swaying thing, right up until the last line fades out. Then, instead of letting it drift away the way most clubs would, they snap out of it with three sharp handclaps and the club’s name, which turns a soppy love song into something with a bit of a swagger to it. It is the tag on the end that makes it theirs, in comparison to other clubs that sing it:

Wise men say

“Only fools rush in.”

But I can’t help

Falling in love with you.

Shall I stay?

Would it be a sin

If I can’t help

Falling in love with you?

Like a river flows

Surely to the sea,

Darling, so it goes

Some things are meant to be.

Take my hand.

Take my whole life, too.

For I can’t help

Falling in love with you.

The Lincoln! (clap, clap, clap)

We’ve Conquered All of League One

In spite of the fact that many opposition supporters turn up at Anfield and ask where the ‘famous atmosphere’ is, there are countless songs that begin life on the Red half of Merseyside before making their way around the rest of the country. One such example is ‘Allez Allez Allez’, which includes the line ‘We’ve conquered all of Europe’. Obviously, Lincoln City fans couldn’t sing the same thing, but that doesn’t matter thanks to the wittiness of supporters, who are always looking for a way to get behind the team. If that includes a bit of boasting then it’s even better.

If any version of the song belongs to a football team, it is this one. The Imps were devastating in the 2025-2026 League One campaign, so it is only right that the fans should come up with a song that honours the club’s performance. Whether it remains in the songbook long-term depends on the success of the team and the sense of humour of the fans. The tune is the well-travelled Allez Allez Allez, but the words are pure Lincoln, a plain-spoken account of seven years stuck in the third tier and the promotion that finally hauled them out of it:

We’ve conquered all of League One,

We’re never gonna stop!

From Wigan down to Plymouth,

We’ve done the fucking lot!

Seven years in League One,

We thought it’d never end,

But we are Lincoln City,

And we’re going up again!

Allez Allez Allez!