It’s coming home? An inescapable anthem for England.
How a 1990s Brit-pop song became England’s World Cup anthem Calum Marsh
On the evening of the 26th of June, 1996, the perennially loathed, obstinately supported England national football team played against the Germans in the semi-finals of the UEFA European Football Championship, and lost the match in penalties (6-5) — a historic defeat decided by a single, unlucky miss.
As it happened, England supporters already had an anthem prepared for this downfall: Three Lions, a rousing barn-burner by Brit-pop band The Lightning Seeds, with lyrics by comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner. “Everyone seems to know the score / they’ve seen it all before,” the song begins. “That England’s gonna throw it away / gonna blow it away.” The chorus is a familiar burden of hope despite constant failure: “Thirty years of hurt / Never stopped me dreaming.”
It has of course been 50 years of hurt now, for English football fans: it was all the way back in 1966 that the country won the World Cup for the first and, so far, only time, prevailing over West Germany 4-2 in a victory that’s been savoured to its last enduring ounce through a half-century of demoralized frustration.
As we find ourselves again amid the humid months of World Cup fever, indefatigable optimism returns to England, whose soccer-adoring millions are incapable of anything less than blind conviction. This has been further propagated by a display of English fortitude basically un-glimpsed in living memory — a winning streak that includes a record-breaking landslide over Panama in the first round, a narrow success against Colombia in penalties that vaulted them into the quarter finals and a decidedly competent victory over Sweden that has brought them into the semi-finals — and consequently faith in England’s forthcoming triumph has never been more certain.
That faith has manifested as one enthusiastic refrain: “It’s coming home.” (“It,” in this case, meaning the FIFA World Cup trophy — though in what sense that trophy would be returning home isn’t precisely clear.) “It’s coming home” has emerged as the prevailing watchword and catchphrase of the World Cup ’18 among the English. It is the de facto official hashtag of the championship; it’s the definitive motto, the declaration and the battle cry nationwide.
If you should be in England during the World Cup, you will hear it uttered every few minutes as if it were a totally casual remark: “Oy, mate, it’s coming home,” one lad will say to another. “Aye. It’s coming home,” will come the unvarying response. I have never in my life heard a phrase chanted, shouted, sung or proclaimed to quite the degree of ubiquity as these three words enjoy in England at the moment. And that is entirely thanks to Three Lions.
Three Lions was written, with a mordant irony only possible in Great Britain, to celebrate the arrival of the European Championship in 1996 to England, the idea being that football would be thereby returning to the place of the modern game’s birth. Baddiel and Skinner, its comic cowriters, have said they meant the song to reflect the realities of British football fandom in the intervening decades since their fleeting ultimate victory — “a bittersweet love song” to a team that can only be relied upon to screw it all up. And yet Three Lions, so easily sung-along to, was immediately taken up as the bona fide anthem of Team England: it represented something deep and fundamental about the desire to see England win, and about the routine of watching them fail, and soon became a rallying cry for a nation accustomed to cynicism but devoted to unshakable belief.
In 1998, the Lightning Seeds re-released Three Lions with new lyrics, an opportune cash-in with lyrics updated to reflect the loss two years earlier. It was now ideally poised to embody England’s aspirations for World Cup ’98 — and indeed it became, for the second time in two years, a No. 1 single in the United Kingdom. What’s extraordinary, although perhaps unsurprising, is that the song continues to chart — once every four years like clockwork, as England’s football-winning ambitions remain as intimately tied to the single as the yuletide holidays do to Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas.
In 2018, right at this moment, Three Lions is allpervasive on the English airwaves, utterly unavoidable at bars and pubs, pumped out virtually on repeat before, during and after English World Cup matches. Before England’s game against Belgium I heard it played, sung and screamed three dozen times; in the hours afterward, I heard it performed at karaoke.
The ironic thing is that Three Lions is not a song about winning football, but about losing it — losing it in crushing, brutal, humiliating agony, in ways both unbearable and expected by anyone who admires this team. What are we to do with the losers’ anthem if England — as seems more possible than at anytime since 1990’s fourth place finish in Italy — actually go on to win? Though perhaps that’s getting ahead of things somewhat; almost certainly, as the Lightning Seeds immortalized, the team will manage despite the confidence of the country behind them to make an error in judgment or tactics and get the boot before seizing the trophy.
“It’s coming home / It’s coming home / football’s coming home,” runs the chorus that has become the universal England fan refrain. Fair, but we mustn’t forget the line which follows: “I know that was then / but it could be again.” That “could,” so tentative and clouded by doubt, says it all.