Last weekend the Premier League season kicked off again, with thousands of fans going to watch their favourites in action. I was among those thousands, standing in the away section as the mighty Fulham travelled to Brighton. A fine time was had, not least due to crowd favourite Rodrigo Muniz earning us a point with a thoroughly deserved equaliser in additional time. The near constant singing in the away section led me to reflect on the relationship between music and football – as you know, two of my favourite things.

Football fans have sung on the terraces (back when there were terraces) for generations, sometimes trotting out the same old standards as everyone other team, sometime showing a praiseworthy sense of wit and creativity. The current set of regular songs taken up by Fulham fans include reworkings of songs by The Human League (‘Kenny Tete baby, Kenny Tete wo-oah’), Madness (‘Lukic, in the middle of our pitch’), Rufus and Chaka Kahn (‘Ain’t nobody like Tom Cairney, makes me happy, makes me feel this way’), as well as Slade, Glen Campbell, Abba and – perhaps most impressive of all – a very wordy chant set to the musical interlude of Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s Push It, in honour of Saturday’s goalscorer Rodrigo Muniz. I won't quote the lyrics to it, partly because it relies on a knowledge of his career path including an unsuccessful loan spell elsewhere before coming good back at Fulham, and also because it employs exquisitely judged use of the F word (not Fulham or football, the other one) for emphasis.

Songs add to the sense of fun, as I’ve written about before, but they also play a part in the sense of communal identity, of belonging that is part and parcel of being a football fan. Football crowds have always spanned the generations, and the inevitable sense of nostalgia reflected in the above list leaning towards the 70s and 80s helps to unify those generations. Younger fans adopt songs they might otherwise dismiss, while older fans are sometimes introduced to something new – broadcaster Danny Baker remembers Millwall fans in the early 80s singing a chant based on the recent Spandau Ballet single, something that a large part of the club’s core support at the time wouldn’t necessarily have been queuing up to buy.

In some cases, one particular song becomes associated with one particular club and it sticks. The most obvious example is Liverpool’s You’ll Never Walk Alone, which has been sung at Anfield since 1963, but there are plenty of other examples, including Hibernian’s more recent adoption of The Proclaimers’ classic Sunshine on Leith, which had a memorable airing after the club won the Scottish Cup in 2016.

Football remains one of the only places outside of church where large groups of people regularly come together and sing in the name of a shared, unifying purpose or belief. Sometimes it provides entertainment and humour, and sometimes something much more profound. I’m not suggesting for a moment there’s a parity between the two – they are significant differences, as well as this one similarity – but the comparison helps to underline the importance of music to the football experience, as well as to our human experience in general.