Football Chants Show Why a ‘Super League’ of European Football Was Destined to Fail

Even after decades of professional management, football clubs are still grounded in the communities of their birth, not their billionaire owners. There’s no better proof of that than football chants.

Written by Wonjune Lee

Walk on… Walk on… With Hope, In Your Heart, And You’ll Never Walk Alone…

Anfield, home of Liverpool Football Club (F.C.), is one of the most feared football stadiums in England and the world. And as much as Liverpool fans might want to attribute that to their club’s prowess on the pitch, football often isn’t the scariest part of the stadium. No, the most feared part of the Anfield experience is Liverpool’s devoted fans, the fabled Kopites of Merseyside, who take their shirts off in freezing temperatures and scream their heads off long past the final whistle. At Anfield, no opposing player is safe from taunting, and Liverpool’s fans will make it as difficult as possible for the other team to play. While the Kopites’ reputation is not the best, on account of their less-than-hospitable attitude, there is one part of their religious fandom that manages to capture football fans all over the world. Before every match, the Kopites join each other in singing Gerry and the Pacemakers’ cover of the showtune “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” For a few minutes, tens of thousands of people (most of them wearing red, waving banners of the same color, or proudly holding their team scarves aloft) come together in song, supporting not just the team on the football pitch, but the Liverpool community at large.

While “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is one of the most well-known examples of football chants, it is by no means the only one — football chants are a global phenomenon. From the Celtic Football Club’s passionate rendition of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough” and Barcelona Football Club’s “Un Dia de Partit,” to the Korean National Team’s rendition of “아리랑 [Arirang],” football chants take center stage in both domestic and international competitions. One common thread in all of these chants is that they are based on well-known pieces of music that fans of the community know intimately. Fans then sometimes modify the lyrics of these songs to address common knowledge of teams and players, often with a sense of humor to taunt the opposing team or support their own. One perfect example of this is “His Name is Rio and He Watches From the Stands,” a version of Duran Duran’s “Rio” that pokes fun at the drug-related suspension of Manchester United player Rio Ferdinand in 2004.

One of the most interesting parts of football chants is the spontaneity with which they seem to appear and fade. In most cases, football chants are not coordinated beforehand. No one hands out lyric sheets at games, and there are definitely no pre-planned practice sessions. Chants are born organically, spreading across the stadium from one group of friends, and sometimes spreading across generations of fans. The fact that the original melodies of these songs are extremely well-known, as well as the shared knowledge of context, help them spread. As a result, many chants have unclear origins, having become a part of clubs’ fandom over a slow, natural process. For instance, even an iconic chant such as “Glory Glory,” — which takes from the Union Civil War song “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” itself a folk tune with murky origins — cannot be traced back to a single point in history, as it is shared by multiple clubs and is assumed to have been sung at matches as early as the 1950s. This communal, unmanufactured spread gives chants a sense of community and belonging emblematic of football fandom as a whole.

But these shared experiences aren’t always about football either. Liverpool F.C.’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” can never be heard without evoking memories of the Hillsborough Disaster of April 15, 1989, where overcrowding of Anfield stadium and police negligence led to the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans and hundreds of injuries. Every year, a memorial is held at Anfield on the anniversary of the tragedy, where fans and loved ones sing the song in remembrance of the lives lost, giving the chant meaning outside the sport itself.

Additionally, even after decades of private ownership and professional management, many football clubs maintain strong ties to the working class. For instance, Liverpool F.C.’s dominance in the ‘70s and ‘80s gave hope to many Liverpool residents at a time when Britain was undergoing a painful process of deindustrialization — a hope that is once again represented in their famous promise: “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

Even today, football chants continue to hold meaning outside stadiums, as a tool for communal expression. This year, fans began singing them not simply to support their favorite athletes, but also to protest against their clubs’ owners. In April, twelve of the most wealthy football clubs from across Europe announced that they would be forming a so-called continental Super League, where they would play each other exclusively every year. This contrasts with the current system, in which teams need to finish above a certain rank in their domestic leagues to qualify.

Football fans around the world expressed their outrage regarding the announcement, arguing that the twelve clubs were creating their own league to avoid having to qualify for the financial perks of competing in the existing European league. Additionally, fans felt that the proposed Super League would kill the meritocracy of football and destroy any future repeats of legacy magical stories such as underdog, working-class team Nottingham Forest’s back-to-back European Cup victories in 1979 and 1980, and Porto F.C.'s unlikely victory against Barcelona and Manchester United for the 2004 Champions League title.

Additionally, the fact that so many of the twelve clubs joining the Super League were owned by foreign billionaires (such as the American Glazer family, which owns Manchester United; Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who owns Chelsea F.C.; and Emirati prince Sheikh Mansour, who owns Manchester City) led football fans to believe that those who did not understand their community were selling out their heritage for profit. Fans from all over Europe, including those supporting the twelve teams that had signed on to the Super League, sang chants like “It’s Not Football Anymore” outside stadiums in protest. After days of protests and strong criticism from people of all walks of life (including the rare involvement of a royal, Prince William), nine of the twelve founding clubs of the Super League eventually announced their withdrawal from the days-old league.

Football chants strengthen communities and affirm the significance of fans’ shared experiences. Their emotional effect relies on communal knowledge of the team and its circumstances, as well as of the team’s place in the community outside football. With the fans, the chants represent football’s function as a glue that brings people together, giving them a sense of belonging. To strip these clubs from their places of birth and their domestic leagues in order to have them play international matches day in and day out is not only offensive to the idea of rewarding success, but to the communities they serve. The club owners behind the European Super League should have realized this the first time they heard their fans sing their hearts out.

Afterglow ATXJune 17, 2021wonjune lee, football, soccer, sports