13 Facts About Football chants

Football chants can be simple, consisting of a few loud shouts or spoken words, but more often they are short lines of lyrics and sometimes longer songs.

Football chants are known to have been used by fans from the late 19th century onwards, but developed into the current popular forms in the 1960s.

Football chants can be historic, dating back as early as the formation of the club popularly sung down the years and considered the anthems for these clubs.

The tradition of football chants vary from country to country and team to team, but some chants are common to many clubs and popular internationally.

Fans of the early period had a limited repertoire of Football chants, which become more varied as singing was encouraged by the use of brass bands before games and the community singing movement that arose in the 1920s.

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Some abuses are racial in nature; for example, anti-Semitic Football chants directed at Tottenham Hotspur began in the 1960s, against the Argentine club Atlanta, and against the Dutch club Ajax in the 1970s.

Concerns over the abusive nature of some of these Football chants later led to measures in various countries to control them, for example, the British government made racist and indecent Football chants an offence in the UK in 1991.

Hand-clapping Football chants were popular in South American countries such as Brazil before it spread to other countries.

Some Football chants consist simply of a loud shout or whoop with a hand clap, sometimes led by a drum beat that gets increasingly faster, such as the Viking Thunder Clap made popular by fans of Iceland.

Similar Football chants have been performed by fans of teams such as Motherwell and Lens, and a version called "Boom Boom Clap" has been used by fans of North American clubs such as Seattle Sounders FC and Toronto FC since 2008 as well as the American national teams.

Several football chants are based on hymns, with "Cwm Rhondda" being one of the most popular tunes to copy.

Tune to the Shaker song "Simple Gifts" has spawned many terrace Football chants including "Carefree", a chant associated with Chelsea.

Football chants crowds adapt tunes such as advertising jingles, nursery rhymes and theme tunes.