Football Comes Home – The Ghost of a Message

There’s a ghost of a message in the air today. Three little words that you probably didn’t know came from an advertising agency in 1995. 

The agency was Saatchi and Saatchi – masters of the three word zeitgeist-summation line and creatives behind the infamous “Labour’s Not Working” ad.

The message would’ve been plastered across every single red top had England not contrived to lose in a second consecutive (men’s) European final. 

Football Comes Home.

Blame Simply Red

If you’re a subscriber to The Athletic, give this article on football coming home a read. It’s well worth your time. 

If you’re not a subscriber, here’s the general gist of the message’s rise to the very top of a nation’s consciousness.

• Some idiot decided to give Mick Hucknall the job of writing a terrace anthem to get fans excited for Euro 96.
• Mick Hucknall wrote a Mick Hucknall song. Fans didn’t care, at all.
• A record producer decided to ask the bloke who did the Goal of the Month music on Match of the Day – Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds – to write something better in conjunction with comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner.
• The brief was three words, taken from Saatchi & Saatchi’s promotion deck for the tournament. Football comes home.
• Baddiel, Skinner and the Lightning Seeds wrote an absolute banger and fans loved it.
• Then they released it again.
• And a third time to ever diminishing returns.

You know the rest. You’ve heard it belted out from terraces, watched the Lionesses dancing to it at a press conference, seen all of the ads playing on it. 

And had England not done what England always do, you’d have been bombarded with it across every single channel today.

But they lost. Of course they did. But isn’t that the point?

A Message to Represent a Nation

Some countries come with a message baked in. American exceptionalism. The liberté, égalité, fraternité of la belle France. Some countries try and brand themselves – look at our Northern neighbours who tried the half-baked and ultimately abandoned “best small country in the world” slogan.

The difference between America and Scotland is the authenticity of the message. Americans genuinely do wake up in the morning and think they’re in the land of the free, home of the brave, most exceptional nation on Earth. I’d wager there are fewer Scots that throw open their curtains in Dumbarton or Leith and think “I’m glad I’m not in New Zealand.” 

And that’s where Football’s Coming Home shines. It’s authentically English in multiple ways.

Many will tell you it’s a wistful message of hoping beyond hope, of finally banishing decades and decades of misery. Of believing that things can only get better. It speaks to the English values of realism tempered by cautious optimism. 

Others, possibly in Dumbarton and Leith, will tell you it’s braggadocious English chest-pumping. Unearned pride in the achievements of other people (mostly long-dead). Of having ideas above one’s station.

Hell, Croatians, Italians and now the Spanish will tell you it’s proof that those smug Englishers needed to be taken down a peg or two.

The fact it’s seen as authentically English from both within and without the country’s borders shows that a good message is one that can pull double duty. It has to be embodied by the nation, organisation or country using the message, but also believed by those outside who’ll always see a message through their own lens, with their own preconceptions.

It’s why we wrote about Victoria Bitter and not Stella Artois. Stella’s staff and stakeholders might view their product as reassuringly expensive, but it has a far darker reputation in the Wetherspoons up and down the country where it’s viewed as the fighting man’s pint of choice. A message written for chic Euro bars falls inauthentically flat in the spit and sawdust locals of the UK.

Truth in advertising

When I came up with the idea of this post the morning after the semi final, I had this key takeaway all planned out. Football Comes Home would be proof that a message, if it’s true enough, resonant enough, believed enough, can be aspirational. It’s not where you’re at, it’s where you’re going.

Football Comes Home wasn’t written about a team who’d failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, or who bombed out of the quarter finals in 2006, or came within a Saka penalty of glory in 2021. It was a message that would eventually be embodied by Southgate’s victors of 2024.

But in my heart of hearts, I knew I’d be writing this takeaway. That a message can be true if you embody it, even if you never quite achieve it. You might never take home the trophy, but if you’re true to the mindset that brought your message to the fore, you’ll get ever closer.

Because it’s not Saatchi & Saatchi’s message we take to heart. It’s not Football Comes Home that speaks to a nation. It’s Baddiel and Skinner’s spin.

Football’s Coming Home.

They just never told us when.