Three Lions – The football anthem that unites a nation

“It doesn’t bother me that even though I’ve done so much more in my career, when I die they’ll say ‘best known for co-creating the England football anthem the Three Lions’.”

Thirty years after the song was released, David Baddiel is proud of it and fondly recalls a time when football almost came home.

“I think it’s a fantastic example of something that wasn’t really designed as a popular thing,” Baddiel says.

“There was no top-down element to it. It was just three footballers trying to write about football and it caught fire.”

You can say it again. People of a certain age will remember it as the soundtrack to the English summer of 1996 – Britpop, Cool Britannia and England coming close to winning a major tournament.

And for a new generation of football fans it has become the England song everyone knows and sings at big events.

Liam Edwards, born in 1997 from England Supporters Travel Club, said: “Even as a child I remember being lit up by this song.

“I think it’s kind of embedded in England football history. It means community, togetherness and unity over one thing – that we’re desperate to see England win!

“I think it’s a song that follows the journey and we’ll sing it wherever the England national team sends us. I’ve been to some strange places – like Kaliningrad in Russia – where you can hear ‘it’s coming home’. We also sang it at the World Cup in Qatar and Euro 2020.”

So how did the Three Lions come about? In 1996, Baddiel and fellow comedian Frank Skinner were established stars. Their football comedy show Fantasy Football League was a big hit and attracted six million viewers.

When The Lightning Seeds frontman Ian Brody was asked by the Football Association to write the music for an England song for Euro ’96, he felt that Baddiel and Skinner were the natural choices to write some of the lyrics.

“Ian Broody – bless him – felt that me and Frank represented, in a sort of grassroots way, the football fans of the country,” Baddiel said.

“We thought, how can we make a convincing case for being an England supporter? And the way we did it was to talk about England’s loss.”