Chants and anthems are part of the fabric of global soccer. Canada has catching up to do

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For decades, Wigan Athletic had mostly been known for its mediocrity.

Mired in League One, the third tier of the English football system, the squad from Greater Manchester had no real reason to think that the 2015-16 season would be any different than the rest. Which meant holding its own in its division, but with no real prospects of moving up the competitive ladder.

But Will Grigg had different plans.

The Wigan striker came out of the box hot, scoring goals at an impressive clip. (He would score 28 times that season.) Diehard fan Sean Kennedy was listening to a nineties hit by the Italian performer, Gala, called Freed from Desire, when he was inspired to change the words a little.

His retool of the dance classic spawned the line: “Will Grigg’s on fire, your defence is terrified.” While it doesn’t look like much as inspiring words go, it was the easy accessibility of the melody, in combination with a pithy take, that made Will Grigg’s on fire one of the all-time great football, er, soccer chants. Not only did Wigan fans love it, it was pinched by supporters of other teams who substituted Will Grigg for a star on their own team.

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If you’re not schooled in the art of the soccer chant, you might be thinking: how hard can it be to create a good one? I mean, if Will Grigg’s on fire is a classic, it must be a pretty low bar. In this, you would be mistaken.

Great soccer chants can sometimes capture a moment in time, the zeitgeist of an era. They are said to have had their beginnings in Victorian England. Andrew Lawn, who wrote a book on English football culture entitled We Lose Every Week: The History of Football Chanting, wrote that the songs soccer fans sing are the one surviving embodiment of an organic living folk tradition.

In a 2024 essay titled “Crafting Identity Through Oral Tradition: English Football Chants and Anglo-Saxon Poetry,” author Carl Sell wrote that fandom is tied to location and ultimately creates a cultural identity that becomes inseparable from one’s personal identity. “The pinnacle of this identity comes from the shared chants sung by supporters, which allows for a group of people to share a single, unified voice,” he wrote.

Stephen Burns has been a lifelong soccer fan. He enjoyed a brief professional career in the late 1980s and early nineties, suiting up for the Vancouver 86ers for a couple of years in the Canadian Soccer League. Born in Belfast and a devoted Celtic FC fan, Burns says that while chants are fun, team songs or anthems are something else entirely.

“The emotion you hear in those songs is actually quite moving,” Burns said. “And they are passed along from generation to generation. It’s quite something when you think about it.”

Celtic’s game anthem is You’ll Never Walk Alone, which is also Liverpool’s. While Celtic maintains it started singing the song first, most agree Liverpool lays rightful ownership to that claim. It’s derived from the 1963 hit by the British band Gerry and the Pacemakers. As it climbed in popularity, a rendition found its way to the end zone stands (known as the Kop) at Liverpool’s famed Anfield Stadium.

When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high

And don’t be afraid of the dark

At the end of a storm, there’s a golden sky

And the sweet, silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind

Walk on through the rain

Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on, walk on

With hope in your heart

And you’ll never walk alone

You’ll never walk alone

Words from the song have surely been tattooed on thousands of Celtic and Liverpool fans.

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Chants, meantime, are not only designed to fire up the home crowd or the players on the field. They are often intended to stick the shiv in supporters of the opposing team. This has become something of an art form in U.K. and European soccer.

In a Premier League match during the 2022-23 season, supporters of Nottingham Forest cried out to fans of Newcastle United:

Champions of Europe, you’ll never sing that

You’ll never sing that

You’ll never sing that

Champions of Europe, you’ll never sing that!

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Not infrequently you will hear supporters from a team that is easily winning a game cry out to those on the other side who have gone silent: You’re not singing/You’re not singing anymore.

One of my favourites is a chant from Arsenal supporters who have a fierce rivalry with Tottenham Hotspur. Over the years, Arsenal has been the far superior team. The team’s fans came up with a chant for those games in which an opponent came to their stadium and performed poorly.

Are you Tottenham?

Are you Tottenham?

Are you Tottenham in disguise?

Are you Tottenham in disguise?

Of course, these fans and those in many other parts of the world have had a healthy head start on North America when it comes to the art of the chant.

U.S. supporters have been ridiculed for their lame “I believe that we will win” chant at World Cup games. Ditto for their inevitable and tiresome “U.S.A., U.S.A., U.S.A.” Although it’s not like Canada has distinguished itself in this department either.

The Voyageurs, fans of Canada that have become a supporter club for the national soccer team for decades, have led chants at the games involving the men’s squad at this year’s World Cup.

Often a member of the Voyageurs goes to the front of a section and gets a call-and-response chant going:

Ca-na-da

Ca-na-da

Come on you boys in red!

Come on you boys in red!

Canada is red and white!

Like I said, we have a way to go.

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Something tells me that there will be a far bigger appetite for wanting to establish a greater cultural identity around soccer in this country in the years ahead, including tribal aspects of the game like anthems and chants.

While they may seem insignificant, they can have meaning that extend far beyond the pitch. They can establish a powerful linguistic identity that binds communities and generations for eternity.