Why do sports fans chant?

Why do sports fans chant? Is it just to support their team or is there more to it than that? (Spoiler alert: there is more to it than that.)

Join me, Ian Forth, in a spirited discussion which will take in the Chip Butty Song, organic living folk traditions, secular rituals, the Maori hakka, Sufi whirling dervishes, the Covid effect, Pat Nevin, various professors, Posh Spice and the origin of language. 

Then, finally answer the question - Why do sports fans chant?

Be expertly briefed each week on a wide variety of intriguing musical topics.

Chapters

• 1:24 Introduction
• 1:49 The Medium-Sized Dive
• 3:59 Chanting and community identity
• 7:25 Chanting and theatrical identity
• 7:55 Chanting as a marker of the individual tribe
• 8:55 Completing the sonic contribution to the visual spectacle
• 11:21 Chanting and the effect on players
• 12:27 Lowering of personal autonomy
• 14:33 Chanting and protesting
• 16:12 Chanting and pre-literate culture
• 17:19 Conclusions

Transcript

Introduction

You fill up my senses
Like a gallon of Magnet
Like a packet of Woodbines
Like a good pinch of snuff
Like a night out in Sheffield
Like a greasy chip butty
Like Sheffield United
Come fill me again

Not my words, but the song to which the football team Sheffield United take the field and all their supporters join in. But why is that? Why do football supporters chant, exactly? They don’t have to, but they do.

It’s time to take a medium-sized dive.

The Medium-sized Dive

Football chants may be considered modern examples of traditional storytelling and folk songs. According to folk singer Martin Carthy, football chants are "the one surviving embodiment of an organic living folk tradition."

Football chants have been around since the 19th century, but it was in the 1960s that their nature started to change. Pop songs started being played over the PA at matches instead of brass bands, encouraging fans to start their own singing based on popular tunes. Intense chanting by South American and Italian fans during the 1962 and 1966 World Cups may have encouraged British fans who were previously more reserved to do the same.

Liverpool supporters, buoyed by Beatlemania sweeping over the world, started modifying popular songs in the early ‘60s to suit their own purposes, and this practice quickly spread to fans of other clubs. Abusive chants targeted at rival team or fans also became widespread. These days the spread of international football available via TV in many countries means that a chant based on the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army which originated in Belgium with a Bruges club has become adopted around the world.

So that’s a thumbnail sketch of the history of chanting, especially in England, but the question remains, why do fans chant? It’s time for an entirely reasonable debate.

The entirely reasonable debate

I am indebted to Abigail Birch-Price, singer and composer, for some of the inspiration for the points I’m about to make.

Chanting creates a communal identity

Perhaps the most important aspect of football chanting is the sense of group identity it fosters. One of the core human drivers is for individuals to belong to something bigger than themselves as numerous psychological studies have shown. Chanting immediately creates an emotional connection to community, almost regardless of what is being chanted or the quality of the chanting itself. It is a similar sense of belonging that used to occur when a village convened to sing hymns on a Sunday, and it’s not a stretch to say that football chanting has become a secular ritual which has replaced the old religious ritual.

You may ask – well it’s a ritual, but is it any more than that? Rituals can sometimes become quaint and meaningless over time, and even drift into superstitious pointlessness. But, in fact, every social group ever studied, from the Maori Hakka to the Sufi Whirling Dervishes to people in a Slough paper merchants performing an awkward rendition of Happy Birthday to You around the coffee machine, engages in some form of group chanting. The reason it persists is because group singing's been shown to have a powerful effect on mood. Synchronising your breathing, heartrate and voice with other people produces a strong sensation of connection.

It’s true that football chants can be rude, offensive, even racist or homophobic, but all communities define themselves not just by what they’re for but also what they’re against. There are multiple layers within football chants, relating to culture, politics, emotion, society and group identity. It’s a safe space for the individual to achieve a catharsis of burning off their emotions, not afforded them during the rest of the week, at home or in the office. They don’t have to worry about social tact or indeed about singing in tune. It’s an opportunity for people from different genders, nationalities and socio-economic backgrounds to create a sense of group identity and loyalty which barely exists elsewhere in modern life beyond their extended family.

Two final points before we leave identity.

Sometimes the rituals become theatrical. We have been treated to the mass ranks of the orange-clad Dutch supporters overwhelming the towns of Germany in the Euros 2024. The point is the cultural specificity of that theatricality which no other culture can replicate, or not satisfactorily.

Final point is that when a visitor goes abroad or to a smaller club they are often bewildered by the strange, meaningless chants. These are shibboleths – references and meaning which only the local tribe understand and respond to. It could be booing a player who used to represent the team in the opposition and left on bad terms, something topical from the previous week’s local events, or a complex chant that only those fans sing and know the words to.

But at the heart of chanting is always a quest for communal identity.

Chanting provides a sonic accompaniment absent from the match itself and completes the performance

As Sociology Professor Les Back said, “Experiencing football as a fan was always as much about the sounds of the stadium as the visual exhibition of the game itself.”

What matters most to the fans is that chants are actually happening, regardless of their content. Speaking as someone who once attended a lot of matches in away stadia supporting my team, it may have been intimidating experiencing a wall of noise from opposition fans, but it was also one of the reasons for attending the live experience, however hostile the chanting. In the converse way that some people attend a Pink Floyd gig for the light show, it’s certainly the case that an away win, for example, against a hostile background cacophony is even more valued.

Notably when I first took my now wife to football matches, she enjoyed the chanting more than anything else. She still remembers one which accompanied opposition fans leaving a game early when their side was losing – “We can see you sneaking out.”

Essentially the fans are bringing their own contribution to the spectacle via these chants. They’re completing their half of the contract in the spectacle. These community rituals may ultimately be more meaningful - and certainly provide the continuity from season to season - than what happens on the pitch. After all, the fans care more than most players, who may well be playing for someone else next season and rarely nowadays hail from the local area.

Chants affect the players

It is clear the chants do affect the players. Pat Nevin, the former Chelsea player, broadcaster and indeed a player who once missed training to attend a Cocteau Twins concert, said chanting “always had a profound effect; it was special and a complete confidence booster.” Sports psychologist Tom Bates points out that it forces players to raise their game through the guilt, even shame, of letting down the crowd otherwise. “They want to live up to expectations.”

Alternatively, chants can, not surprisingly, have a negative effect. Nevin said hearing your own fans singing a song of vilification is “like a stab in the heart.” It’s not uncommon for a player or sometimes a team to perform better away from home where there aren’t waves of negativity rolling down from the home stands.

It lowers personal autonomy, not always in a good way 

When I was young you would know there was trouble breaking out in the playground because a tight ring would form round the boys who were squaring up and the surrounding crowd would start chanting “Fight Fight Fight”. At that stage the two aggressors probably felt they’d be letting the crowd down by not going through with the scrap.

When the Normans invaded England in 1066 they were met with a serried rank of the English all chanting “Out Out Out “. This created team spirit in them and intimidated the invaders. It’s been shown that soldiers who sing when they march are more likely to perform better in communal tasks at the end of a march. Indeed, there are some anthropologists who believe this might even be the origin of language itself, as the incoherent grunts of primitive people evolved into articulate chants.

When you’re inside a cohort of supporters, sitting down enjoying the game, someone will start up a chant of Stand Up If You Hate City or something similar. What are you supposed to do? If you stay seated you can no longer see, but more worryingly, what will the people around think if you don’t stand up? That, horror of horrors, you don’t hate that other club? So, your personal autonomy is lowered by chanting.

In the recent documentary about David Beckham his wife Victoria amusingly refers to an entire stadium of West Ham fans chanting an extremely lewd chant at her expense. The chanting no doubt triggered baser emotions and led individuals to chant a sentiment they would never articulate to her in person.

Chanting can create an opportunity to protest

Fans don’t just use the opportunity of chanting to support their team or denigrate the opposition. The reverse may apply too as they demand the removal of a player, a manager or the board of directors. Or there may be a business decision they feel strongly about such as a takeover plan or the move to a new stadium. Liverpool fans regularly chanted "Justice for the 96" in support of the Hillsborough disaster victims. It is a more visceral means of protest than coordinating a petition and the theatre can be amplified by the earned media it elicits.

Sometimes there are broader societal issues, especially at a national team level.

Iranian fans at the 2018 World Cup protested at the banning of women from attending football matches in Iran. Before the matches, fans, including women from Iran, mingled together in the streets of St Petersburg chanting and banners were also displayed in the stadium. It is not only the content of the chants that support such beliefs, but also the opportunity and ability to sing them.

Chanting is a throwback to communicating in a pre-literate culture

And there is a final reason that people might chant at a football match. Whenever anthropologists study pre-literate cultures they always discover chanting and singing. Even today in India, it's the chanted version of Vedic texts that's seen as the definitive version, not the written form. 

It has therefore been suggested that chanting is an echo of the pre-literate era, which, after all is the vast majority of human timespan on this planet. Chanting can form the best method of encoding and sharing cultural knowledge. We can probably all remember chanting simple songs in primary school and then we graduated to books. Without the graduation to writing in society, the chanting would have attained a far deeper significance.