Football chiefs scrap the World Cup anthem

For some football fans they are a nostalgic reminder of World Cups past, for others a grim record of England’s failures. But this year, for the first time, the FA has neither commissioned a World Cup single nor is planning to endorse an unofficial anthem to mark the competition.

WITH their jaunty music and supposedly uplifting words they have long been a familiar feature of England’s repeated attempts to banish what now amount to 52 years of hurt.

Indeed they were often the last thing the players heard before jetting off to the World Cup every four years.

Now, however, the Football Association has kicked the tradition of the World Cup song into touch, perhaps hoping that it may herald a change in fortunes.

The FA has neither commissioned an official single nor is it planning to endorse an unofficial anthem to mark the competition in Russia next month.

With Gareth Southgate, England’s manager, preparing to name his 23man squad for the tournament before the June 4 deadline, and two friendlies against Nigeria and Costa Rica coming up, it was left to an FA spokesman to announce the decision yesterday.

“There is no official World Cup song planned,” he declared. The ostensive reason appears to be that the manager does not want any off-field distractions.

But the patchy history of some previous World Cup songs may have also influenced the FA’S thinking.

At the last tournament in 2014, Gary Barlow’s reworking of the Take That hit Greatest Day, featuring stars of pop and football, including Pixie Lott and Gary Lineker, was dropped in the leadup to the competition. A video had been unveiled for Sport Relief in March but a single was never released.

In 2010, there was only Shout, an unofficial release featuring James Corden and Dizzee Rascal, but it topped the charts. Four years earlier, World at Your Feet by Embrace, went to number three.

In 1998 the Spice Girls performed with Echo and the Bunnymen star Ian Mcculloch on that year’s World Cup song (How Does It Feel to Be) on Top of the World. But it was outsold by the official track of the 1996 European Championships, Three

Lions, by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and the Lightning Seeds – this time called Three Lions ’98.

Reports that Chas and Dave, who have just released their first new music for 30 years, were writing an unofficial anthem for Russia appeared to be scotched yesterday by Nik Hodges, the band’s manager and drummer, who said: “There’s certainly no solid plan.”

The tradition began in 1970 with the squad singing Back Home – four years after England won the tournament – without an official anthem. Perhaps the FA have heeded the lesson of history.