A version of this article was first published the last time football was supposed to be coming home — during Euro 2020 on the morning of England’s semi-final against Denmark.
The official song of Euro 96 was “We’re In This Together” by Simply Red, but when Mick Hucknall played it at the competition draw at the Birmingham International Convention Centre in December 1995, the organisers realised they needed something else to get the fans going.
The Football Association had asked Rick Blaskey, a former record label executive, to help them come up with an anthem to amplify the appeal of the Euros. He had worked on the 1991 Rugby World Cup and USA 94 and wanted a feel-good anthem the whole country would buy into, (a football equivalent of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”), but written from scratch rather than taken from anywhere else. He knew the official anthem was not going to achieve that.
Blaskey had a meeting at the FA’s old headquarters at Lancaster Gate. They showed him a document produced by Saatchi & Saatchi, who were advising on promoting the tournament. The document contained just three words: “Football Comes Home.” Here was the theme for the popular fan anthem Blaskey had been searching for.
So who would make the song? Blaskey asked BBC head of sport Brian Barwick if he knew who had written the tune that accompanied “Goal of the Month” on Match of the Day and was told it was “Life of Riley” by the Lightning Seeds. Ian Broudie was initially reluctant to come on board, but when he heard that Blaskey had asked Frank Skinner and David Baddiel to write the lyrics, he agreed.
“I told them to do anything they liked, as long as they called it ‘Football Comes Home’,” Blaskey tells The Athletic. “Just because I knew that I had to go back to the FA with something that was a brand extension to their campaign.”
Broudie wrote the song with its famous two choruses. Skinner and Baddiel wrote the words. When the FA came up with the idea for a popular anthem for the Euros, all they wanted was something better than Simply Red. But their idea, and Baddiel, Skinner and Broudie’s execution of it, created the single most influential cultural artefact in English football history.
Even now the song is inescapable. Whenever a major tournament rolls around, it is sung by fans in the stands, in pubs, gardens and on streets around the country. A new generation of fans who were born long after 1996 or even 1998 have adopted it as their own and, sure enough, it was echoing around Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion in the aftermath of England’s impossibly dramatic 2-1 semi-final win over the Netherlands tonight.
Even more widespread than the four minutes of the song itself is the line “It’s Coming Home”. One feature of England’s recent major tournaments has been the mass use of that short phrase. It has become the punchline to memes and a trending hashtag on X. Decades after Saatchi & Saatchi dreamt up “Football Comes Home”, this tweaked version has become the motto of a whole football nation. It is the closest thing English fans have to a shibboleth, a phrase used by members of a group to denote their membership to one another.
It is easy to see why people who do not support England might be slightly turned off by the in-your-face ubiquity of “It’s Coming Home” and the attempts it represents to cajole everyone onto the same page.
Christopher Hitchens wrote an essay for Slate in 2008 subtitled “The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas”, arguing that in December, the U.S. “turns itself into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state”. His argument (which is worth reading in full) hinges on how oppressive it feels to be bombarded with the same message wherever you are for a whole month.
“As in such dismal banana republics, the dreary, sinister thing is that the official propaganda is inescapable,” Hitchens wrote. “You go to a train station or an airport and the image and the music of the Dear Leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, such as a doctor’s office, a store or a restaurant, and the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations are to be heard. So, unless you are fortunate, are the same cheap and mass-produced images and pictures, from snowmen to cribs to reindeer.”
Whether you think “Three Lions” is a “tinny, maddening, repetitive ululation” or not, there is little question that the song — and the “It’s Coming Home” meme — does not travel well outside of England. Whether it is arrogant or earnest or ironic has become one of the more contested topics of the past few years.
When Croatia knocked England out of the World Cup semi-final in Moscow in 2018, Croatian centre-back Vedran Corluka famously said to English journalists in the mixed zone: “It’s not coming home.” And Luka Modric, speaking after masterminding Croatia’s 2-1 extra-time win, said English arrogance helped to motivate his team. “People were talking, English journalists, pundits from television,” Modric said. “They underestimated Croatia tonight and that was a huge mistake. They should be more humble and respect their opponents more.”
England fans during the 2018 World Cup in Russia (Alexander Nemenov/Getty Images)
Ahead of Denmark’s Euro 2020 semi-final against England, Kasper Schmeichel was asked about whether his team could stop it from coming home and with a big smile he replied: “Has it ever been home? Have you ever won it?” It suggested how other countries perceive the gulf between English confidence and achievements and how keen they are to stop England from making the song real. Sure enough, when England lost the final of that tournament to Italy, defender Leonardo Bonucci roared down one pitchside camera: “It’s coming to Rome.”
You can see why “It’s Coming Home” would be taken in some quarters as a literal prediction that England would win the tournament. And why England’s elimination, in the context of all those “It’s Coming Home” memes, would be taken as the height of hubris.
But the meaning of the phrase and the song it grows out of is more layered than that. The song was never meant to be an arrogant prediction that England were going to win Euro 96, just as the 1998 version was not a prediction about that World Cup either. The song was more about hope than realistic expectation, and even the “It’s Coming Home” meme operated more as an in-joke rather than as a boast, even if it did not always appear that way to those who do not like it. (Perhaps it is like any in-joke shared by any family or club or in-group, where those who are part of the joke understand that something can be both literal and ironic at the same time, even if it does not always appear that way from the outside.)
For the men who wrote the song, it was never about boasting that England were the best team and were going to dominate the tournament. Baddiel, speaking on talkSPORT before Euro 2020, said his goal with Skinner was to write a song about the reality of being a football fan. “England had this long history of releasing songs saying, ‘We’re going to win’, which turned out to be wrong,” Baddiel said. “So basically ‘Three Lions’ is written from the point of view of: we probably won’t win. Everyone is saying we’re rubbish, which they do most of the time. But there’s this magical thinking that goes on where you believe that despite that, we are going to win. And that’s really how the song chimes with football fans.”
England fans are used to crushing disappointment (Tolga Akmen/Getty Images)
In a separate interview with The Times, Baddiel tried to distance the song from the accusations of arrogance and triumphalism that it is sometimes now attributed to it. “The song is so vulnerable and untriumphalist,” he said. “You can’t sing that song as an anthem of nationalism. It’s a vulnerable patriotism.”
To go back to Blaskey, who came up with the idea of the song in the first place: “I don’t think they ever meant ‘It’s Coming Home’ to mean that we were going to win the tournament,” he says. “It was more: home is where the heart is. ‘Football Comes Home’ was the strapline of the tournament.”
And there lies the dual meaning of the song. It came to mean not only the possibility of England winning the Euros, but also the mere fact of hosting a tournament in England for the first time in 30 years and the opportunity that presented for football to be a mass communal experience. Even though England went out in the semi-finals of Euro 96, the mere fact of a full Wembley singing the song together meant that football had, in one sense, come home anyway.
Fast forward to the modern day and English football has in many ways changed beyond recognition. The takeovers of Chelsea, Manchester City and more recently Newcastle United have transformed the financial landscape of the Premier League, which is now watched all over the world.
But just like in Euro 96, there is still a hope among many that the England team can provide us with something different: a more communal shared experience than we get with club football. That is part of the promise of “It’s Coming Home”, ever since it was first sung by a full Wembley way back in 1996, right through to the massive games the stadium hosted at Euro 2020.
After England beat Germany and Denmark in the knockout stages of that tournament, two of the first big matches played in front of fans since the Covid-19 pandemic, the players walked around the pitch as the crowd sang “Three Lions” again. To be there was to experience a sense that the England football team was providing a national unifying experience once again, with Wembley at its epicentre.
That was one of the hopes of Euro 96, that football would come home. It flared again in 2021, and that dream is now ignited once more now in the wake of Ollie Watkins’ moment of brilliance in Dortmund.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Sam Richardson)
