The 10 best football songs of all time

Take a song that typically gets your parents on the dance floor, add tinned crowd noise and a verse sung by the Arsenal squad and you’ve got the team’s FA Cup cover of ‘Hot Stuff’. It’s so close to the original version that we’re not 100 percent sure it deserves a spot on this list, but ‘keep telling us we're boring – we'll just keep on scoring’ is hella catchy.

If you ever need to show someone what the ’90s were like in less than four minutes, just make them watch the video for this track. It’s got rave vibes (thanks to the ‘I Like to Move It’-esque bassline) plus a call-and-response break more suited to ’90s hip hop, as well as Beckham with curtains and footage of the Man U team hanging out in the studio with Pete Waterman.

While Everton keep it simple with the lyrics on this track, but the video of them performing the track on 'Wogan' makes it special. Look at those duck-egg tracksuits, that hair and the way the team are standing like they’ve been held hostage by choirmaster Gareth May. Also featured: a whistling break and Wogan waving an Everton scarf with unstoppable passion.

The lyrics to ‘Ossie’s Dream’ take melodrama to the extreme: ‘The kings are claiming the throne… We know the enemy will fear us in the battle coming up!’ But thanks to its cheeky, piano-bashing Chas & Dave tune the song’s just crying out to be sung in a pub while jumping from foot to foot. Listen to it once and it’ll be stuck in your head all week, even if no-one really remembers who Osvaldo Ardiles even was.

Written by Keith Allen, Alex James from Blur and touring Pink Floyd member Guy Pratt, ‘Vindaloo’ was originally written as a parody of football chants. The leftfield lyrics stuck and eventually ‘Me and me mum and me dad and me gran/And a bucket of vindaloo’ became a chant itself. Look out for young Lily and Alfie Allen in the ‘Bittersweet Symphony’-parodying video.

There’s been some debate in the office about whether Gazza’s rave-era cover of the Lindisfarne classic is a football song or just a song sung by a footballer. We’re giving it the benefit of the doubt because of the numerous references to the ‘Geordie boys’. Also the image of Gazza ‘sittin’ in a sleazy snack bar/Suckin’ sickly sausage rolls’ is too good to miss out.

Both awful and beautiful at the same time, the ‘Anfield Rap’ is a hip hop track written by midfielder Craig Johnston about teaching the team’s non-Scouse players to talk like a Liverpudlian. It nods to LL Cool J, features a Beatles guitar riff and even tackles wage inequality: ‘He gives us stick about the north-south divide/’Cause they got the jobs – yeah, but we got the side.’

Imagine dropping acid with Gazza.  and you’re getting somewhere close to the majesty of ‘Geordie Boys’. Two parts rave culture, one part lad-on-the-lash, the track mashes Paul’s rapping with a soul house vocal. Plus the ‘Top of the Pops’ video shows Gazza flashing his pasty abs in shorts and an unzipped tracksuit top, and absolutely bloody loving it. This is football’s ‘Ebeneezer Goode’.

Recorded for the 1990 World Cup and soaked in beery, bittersweet emotion, ‘World in Motion’ is the musical equivalent of watching the Euro semis in a pub in Peckham. It’s also pretty much the only football song that’s genuinely pleasant to listen to in a non-footballing context. And John Barnes’s rap is, of course, a thing of beauty.

Sure, ‘World In Motion’ is cool, but ‘Three Lions’ is The Definitive Football Song. Written and performed for Euro ’96, it’s chantable, not that painful to listen to and guaranteed to make your dad cry. Just don’t even get us started on the ’98 version.

Read more about why ‘Three Lions’ is the best football song ever written