It’s Coming Home: Is the English fan anthem “Three Lions” a dream, a boast or a way of life?

A version of this article was first published when football was due to come home for the last time – during the 2020 European Championships 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’s draw at the Birmingham International Convention Centre in December 1995, organisers realised they needed something else to get the fans in the mood.

The Football Association had asked Rick Blaskey, a former record label executive, to help them develop an anthem to help boost the appeal of the Euros. He had worked on the 1991 Rugby World Cup and USA 94 and wanted a feel-good anthem that would get the whole country going (a football equivalent of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’), but that would be written from scratch rather than lifted from somewhere else. He knew the official anthem wouldn’t achieve that.

Blaskey had a meeting at the FA’s old headquarters in Lancaster Gate. There he was shown a document from Saatchi & Saatchi, who were advising on the tournament’s bid. The document contained just three words: “Football Comes Home.” That was the theme for the popular fans’ anthem that Blaskey had been looking for.

So who would write the song? Blaskey asked BBC Sport Director Brian Barwick if he knew who wrote the tune to ‘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 hesitant to take part, but when he heard that Blaskey had asked Frank Skinner and David Baddiel to write the lyrics, he agreed.

“I told them they could do whatever they wanted as long as they called it ‘Football Comes Home,'” Blaskey says The athlete“Simply because I knew I had to come back to the FA with something that was a brand extension of their campaign.”

Broudie wrote the song with its famous two choruses. Skinner and Baddiel wrote the lyrics. When the FA came up with the idea for a popular anthem for the European Championships, they wanted nothing better than “Simply Red”. But their idea, and the execution by Baddiel, Skinner and Broudie, created the most influential cultural artifact in English football history.

The song remains a staple today. Whenever a major tournament is on, it is sung by fans in the stands, in pubs, gardens and on the streets across the country. A new generation of fans born long after 1996, or even 1998, have made it their own and, indeed, it echoed around Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion tonight after England’s incredibly dramatic 2-1 semi-final victory over the Netherlands.

Even more widespread than the four minutes of the song itself is the line “It’s Coming Home.” A feature of recent major tournaments in England has been the mass use of this short phrase. It has become the punchline of memes and a trending hashtag on X. Decades after Saatchi & Saatchi came up with “Football Comes Home,” this modified version became the motto of an entire footballing nation. It is the closest thing English fans have to a shibboleth, a phrase used by members of a group to mark their affiliation with one another.

It’s easy to see why people who don’t support England might be easily put off by the ubiquity of “It’s Coming Home” and its associated attempts to bring everyone onto a common point of view.

Christopher Hitchens wrote a 2008 essay for Slate subtitled “The Moral and Aesthetic Nightmare of Christmas,” in which he argued that in December the United States “devolves into the cultural and commercial equivalent of a one-party state.” His argument (which is worth reading in its entirety) revolves around how oppressive it feels to be bombarded with the same message everywhere you go for an entire month.

“As in such bleak banana republics, the sad, sinister thing is that the official propaganda inevitable“, Hitchens wrote. “You go to a train station or an airport and the image and music of the beloved leader are everywhere. You go to a more private place, like a doctor’s office, a shop or a restaurant, and you hear the same tinny, stirring, repetitive cries. And unless you’re very lucky, the same cheap and mass-produced images and photographs are there, from snowmen to nativity scenes to reindeer.”

Whether or not you think “Three Lions” is a “tinny, maddening, repetitive howl,” there’s little doubt that the song – and the “It’s Coming Home” meme – doesn’t sit well outside of England. Whether it’s arrogant, serious, or ironic has become one of the most contentious issues in recent years.

When Croatia knocked England out of the World Cup semi-finals in Moscow in 2018, Croatian centre-back Vedran Corluka told English journalists in the mixed zone: “This is not coming home.” And Luka Modric, who engineered Croatia’s 2-1 extra-time victory, said English arrogance helped motivate his team. “People were talking, English journalists, pundits from TV,” Modric said. “They underestimated Croatia tonight and that was a big mistake. They should be more humble and respect their opponents more.”

England fans during the 2018 World Cup in Russia (Alexander Nemenov/Getty Images)

Before Denmark’s semi-final against England at Euro 2020, Kasper Schmeichel was asked if his team could avoid going home and with a broad smile he replied: “Have you ever been at home? Have you ever won?” It suggested how other countries perceive the gap between English confidence and success and how keen they are to stop England from making the song come true. And indeed, when England lost the final of that tournament to Italy, defender Leonardo Bonucci yelled in front of a pitchside camera: “It’s coming to Rome.”

One can understand why “It’s Coming Home” is taken in some circles as a literal prediction of England winning the tournament. And why England’s elimination is seen as the height of hubris in the context of all these “It’s Coming Home” memes.

But the meaning of the phrase and the song it comes from is more complex. The song was never intended to be an arrogant prediction that England would win Euro 96, any more than the 1998 version was a prediction about that World Cup. The song was more about hope than realistic expectations, and even the “It’s Coming Home” meme worked as an inside joke rather than a boast, even if it didn’t always seem that way to those who didn’t like it. (Perhaps it’s like any inside joke shared by any family, club or group, where those in on the joke understand that something can be both literal and ironic at the same time, even if it doesn’t always seem that way from the outside.)

The men who wrote the song were never about boasting that England were the best team and would dominate the tournament. Baddiel, speaking on talkSPORT ahead of Euro 2020, said his aim with Skinner was to write a song about the reality of being a football fan. “England have this long tradition 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 perspective of: we’re probably not going to win. Everyone says we’re rubbish, which they do most of the time. But there’s this magical thinking where you believe that we’re going to win despite everything. And so the song really resonates with football fans.”

England fans are used to devastating disappointments (Tolga Akmen/Getty Images)

In a separate interview with The Times, Baddiel sought to distance the song from the accusations of arrogance and triumphalism sometimes attributed to it today. “The song is so vulnerable and un-triumphal,” he said. “You can’t sing that song as an anthem of nationalism. It’s a vulnerable patriotism.”

To return to Blaskey, who originally came up with the idea for the song: “I don’t think they ever meant ‘It’s Coming Home’ to mean we were going to win the tournament,” he says. “It was more like, home is where the heart is. ‘Football Comes Home’ was the slogan of the tournament.”

And therein lies the double meaning of the song. It symbolised not only the possibility of England winning the European Championship, but also the very fact that a tournament was being played in England for the first time in 30 years, and the chance that football could become a shared mass experience. Even though England were knocked out of the 1996 European Championship in the semi-finals, the mere fact that a full Wembley Stadium sang the song together meant that football had, in a way, come home nonetheless.

Today, English football has changed beyond recognition in many ways. The takeovers of Chelsea, Manchester City and more recently Newcastle United have changed the financial landscape of the Premier League, which now attracts attention around the world.

But just like Euro 96, there is still hope among many that the England team can offer us something different: a more communal experience than club football. That’s part of the promise of “It’s Coming Home” from the first time it was sung by a full Wembley in 1996, through to the big games the stadium hosted at Euro 2020.

After England beat Germany and Denmark in the knockout stages of that tournament – two of the first major games in front of spectators since the Covid-19 pandemic – the players walked around the pitch as the crowd once again sang “Three Lions”. Those who were there felt that the England football team were once again providing a national unifying experience, with Wembley as the centrepiece.

That was one of the hopes of Euro 1996, that football would come home. That hope flared up again in 2021, and that dream is now being rekindled after Ollie Watkins’ moment of glory in Dortmund.

(Top photos: Getty Images; Design: Sam Richardson)