Friday Favourite #52
It's coming home...
Hello, Friends. I’ve got something really special for you today — a guest essay from my better half. I’d like to say that he wrote it over a few hours this week, but in many ways I suspect he’s been writing it since he was a little boy. It’s been a week of dashed dreams in the beautiful game, but I’m grateful for James reminding us that the prospect of 22 men hoofing a sack of leather around 100 metres of grass is about so much more than a game of football. Like most things that matter deeply, it’s about hope and belonging, identity and nostalgia, and — you guessed it — the feeling of home. Enjoy!
When England’s men’s team lost to West Germany on penalties in the 1990 World Cup semi-final, the final whistle sent an estimated twenty-six million people to the kitchen at once, and the resulting surge in electricity demand — everyone switching on the kettle to make a cup of tea— hit 2,800 megawatts, still the largest televised sport-driven spike ever recorded by power operator National Grid.
The incident — which has since been replicated numerous times during tournament football — typifies how deeply domestic a pursuit watching football is. Picture a match, and you may envisage eighty thousand fans filling Wembley Stadium, the Bernabéu, or the Azteca, but that’s not how most of us actually watch the game. By and large, it happens at home, on the sofa, in front of the telly (or, if you’re watching England, quite possibly from behind the sofa). And on the occasions we don’t watch it at home, we go to the local pub — the public house — to watch it with friends and neighbours in a most secular form of communion.
Football’s vocabulary is steeped in this same domesticity. Matches are played home and away; leagues are officially “domestic” competitions, as distinct from the international game; and the first international football tournament in history was contested in 1884 between the four nations of the British Isles — England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Its name? The British Home Championship.
That domesticity has a far darker side, too. Multiple studies have found that reports of domestic abuse rise significantly around England matches, regardless of the result, but more so after a defeat. It’s a sobering footnote to English football’s most famous rallying cry, “football’s coming home”: for many women, the issue isn’t so much football coming home as their partner.
The defeat to West Germany is one of several England moments referenced in the 1996 song, “Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home)”, a laddish chart-topper that isn’t actually about football, at least not entirely. Just as Jaws isn’t really about a shark, but masculinity and a community trying to protect its home from an unseen threat, “Three Lions” works the same trick. Its stated subject may be football, but what it’s actually about is home or, to be more precise, a particular kind of homesickness and the hopefulness it inspires. (It’s also an extremely catchy song, with a terrace-chant chorus so infectious that plenty of people who’ve never heard the original can sing along.)
Some context: “Three Lions” was written for the Euro ‘96 football tournament that England hosted that year. The music came from Ian Broudie of Liverpudlian indie band the Lightning Seeds; the words from comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner. The FA offered to have footballers sing on it, but Broudie demurred. He didn’t want the song to sound nationalistic, or like propaganda. Instead, he wanted it to be about “being a football fan, which, for 90% of the time, is losing”. Sure enough, the lyrics describe the shared, weary certainty among everyone watching that England are, once again, about to find a way to blow it, and continue to endure “so many jokes, so many sneers”.
In that light, the song’s titular phrase was never about winning anything. Euro ‘96 was the first tournament England had hosted since the 1966 World Cup, and the song borrowed its language from the marketing tagline: “Football Comes Home” was a reference to the fact that the modern rules of the game had been codified in London in 1863, at a tavern meeting of club representatives trying to agree on one set of laws everyone could play by. Ahead of the tournament, UEFA president Lennart Johansson had said the competition was heading “back to the motherland of football” — which is really all the slogan, and the song borrowing it, ever claimed.
The phrase proved durable well beyond the tournament itself. That autumn, at the Labour Party conference, opposition leader Tony Blair borrowed it wholesale: “Seventeen years of hurt never stopped us dreaming: Labour’s coming home.” By the following spring, Labour were back in government, their campaign soundtracked by another “hope in a bottle” pop classic, D:REAM’s “Things Can Only Get Better”, like “Three Lions” a refusal to promise anything beyond the possibility of things improving.
Despite all that, though, the song — and its repetitive claim that “football’s coming home” — has been misread ever since, usually by people with a fairly obvious interest in doing so. Croatia’s star midfielder Luka Modrić and manager Zlatko Dalić reportedly used the phrase as motivation before knocking England out of the 2018 World Cup semi-final, treating it as arrogance. Dutch great Ruud Gullit echoed this sentiment, arguing that football doesn’t belong to any one country. And Denmark’s Kasper Schmeichel got a laugh at England’s expense in 2021 by asking whether football had ever been “home” to begin with.
The song attracts derision from fans of other teams, too, and you can see why. When “Three Lions” came out, “thirty years of hurt” had passed since England had won the World Cup on home soil. Thirty years have now passed since the song itself came out. Few people under a certain age fully understand it today. The context it was written for, the first tournament England had hosted since the glorious summer of 1966, has faded from view, even as the feeling underneath the song hasn’t dated at all.
All the same, they’re missing the point. “It’s coming home” was never a boast about winning the tournament or possession of the game. Instead, as Baddiel has said, it’s an exercise in magical thinking, a song about knowing, on all the available evidence, that you’re going to lose again, but remaining hopeful anyway.
And while “it’s coming home” is the line that everyone knows, the lyric that carries the emotional argument is a smaller one, tucked into the bridge: “I know that was then, but it could be again.” This “could” is the reason England fans put themselves through this particular wringer every couple of years, tournament after tournament. More than that, it’s the rallying cry not just of the football fan specifically, but of anyone standing at some remove from their best years and refusing to accept the distance is final.
In this sense, “Three Lions” is a song about the passage of time, making it a close cousin of Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days”, with its heartbreaking reminder that the years will pass you by without your even noticing, and all that’s left are memories.
Lyrically, “Three Lions” spends much of its time on the highlights reel. Early on, Skinner and Baddiel mention some of England’s most iconic World Cup moments — a tackle by former captain Bobby Moore, Nobby Stiles dancing on the Wembley turf in 1966, Bobby Charlton belting the ball into the net — before arriving at the one moment that’s a “Where were you when…?” memory of my own: Gary Lineker’s late equaliser against West Germany in that 1990 semi-final. In fact, I can recall precisely where I was: in my dressing-gown and pyjamas, allowed to stay up and watch along with everyone else at my boarding school, as the game went to extra time and then the dreaded penalty shootout. I was 12, and that remains as close as England have ever got to winning the World Cup in my lifetime.
In other words, “Three Lions” is an exercise not just in magical thinking, but in nostalgia. That’s an interesting word in this context, of course. It comes from the Greek for homecoming and pain, nostos and algos, coined by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student in the 17th century, to describe Swiss soldiers so sick with longing for the mountains they’d left behind that doctors treated it as an illness. It’s worth noting that nostalgia, in its original form, was a soldier’s condition, not a traveller’s, and it brings us to another aspect of “Three Lions”: its martial undertone.
George Orwell called international sporting contests “war minus the shooting”, and football, of all sports, takes that literally. Midfielders are “generals”. Strikers score from “close range”. Wingers go “bombing” down the touchline. West Germany’s great captain Franz Beckenbauer was known as “Der Kaiser”. Even England’s most infamous World Cup exits get remembered the way wars do, by place rather than score, the name of the city shorthand for the trauma that ensued: the Azteca in ‘86 (the Hand of God); Turin in ‘90 (Gazza’s tears and the first penalty-shootout defeat); Saint-Étienne in ‘98 (Beckham’s red card); Gelsenkirchen in 2006 (Rooney’s red, Ronaldo’s wink). Each one is a campaign that failed, named like a battlefield rather than a fixture.
“Three Lions” — a reference to the crest on England shirts, itself lifted from the banner that Richard the Lionheart took into battle — is of a piece with all that, in as much as it’s about “our boys” being sent overseas to fight on foreign soil. (A 1998 reissue even worked in a nod to hard-as-nails midfielder Paul Ince being “ready for war” — fitting, as it turned out, right up until the penalty he missed in the shootout that ended England’s run.) Every couple of years there’s a new campaign, a new front line, with fresh recruits, and with each defeat, the long wait for victory goes on.
England’s seemingly interminable wait for World Cup glory — and the song it inspired — brings to mind, too, the absurdism of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”. There’s a reason “it’s coming home” was never written as an ironclad promise. The song doesn’t say football will come home; it makes no claim about the future. Nor is the lyric the exhortation, “Football, come home”. Rather, it’s present continuous: an ongoing state, permanently in transit, with no fixed arrival.
And much like England’s second World Cup trophy, Godot hasn’t shown up yet. “I can’t go on like this,” says Estragon, channelling many an England fan. To which Vladimir replies: “That’s what you think.” Indeed, there’s always hope.
So what would England winning the World Cup mean? It’s genuinely hard to say. Lifting the trophy might neuter the song, retire it even. Having broken the seal, England fans might expect a period of sustained success. Then again, it probably wouldn’t work out that way, and we’d soon be back to worrying about retaining the trophy, or winning the next Euros. The ache wouldn’t be resolved; it would just find a new place to sit.
And for as long as there’s football, England fans will sing “Three Lions.” For while it’s evidently a song about football, it’s also operating on a far bigger canvas: time, place, memory, and the belief that things could turn out differently. Stop singing it? There’s more chance of Britain handing the Falkland Islands back to Argentina.
Speaking of which: I finished writing this on the morning after another heartbreaking semi-final defeat, this time at the hands of an Argentina team that refused to go gently into the night. Two goals in the dying light took them through to the final instead, and when the whistle finally went, there was only one thing left to do. Get off the sofa, trudge to the kitchen, and put the kettle on.
On Fridays I share a favourite song, poem, book, film, or other kind of cultural reference that evokes the feeling of home—and what it means to me. I love to include guest posts, so if there’s something you’d like to write about just drop me a line!
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