There’s a moment, usually somewhere around the 70th minute, when you can feel it coming. Someone in the crowd strums an invisible guitar, a few voices join in, and suddenly 80,000 people are belting out an Oasis song that has absolutely nothing to do with football. Wonderwall has become England’s unofficial World Cup anthem, and nobody quite planned it that way.
It started, as these things often do, in the pubs. England fans warming up before matches, a few pints in, reaching for something communal and familiar. Wonderwall ticks every box: everyone knows the words, the chorus is euphoric, and there’s something almost defiantly British about choosing a 1995 Britpop track over anything written specifically for a tournament.
The song’s composer, Noel Gallagher, has never exactly hidden his love of football. A lifelong Manchester City fan, he’s spoken warmly about hearing his music echo around stadiums. “There’s nothing better than a room full of people singing your song,” he once told an interviewer, “especially when half of them probably don’t know what it means.” He’s right. Nobody singing Wonderwall in a fan zone is thinking about whatever Liam claimed it was about.
What makes it stick is the release it offers. England tournaments are famously tense affairs. The penalty shootout trauma runs deep, the hope is always fragile, and the emotional weight of every match is enormous. Wonderwall sidesteps all of that. It’s joyful without being triumphalist, nostalgic without being maudlin. It belongs to everyone who grew up in Britain in the last 30 years.
There’s also the structural genius of that chorus. It builds, it surges, it demands participation. You simply cannot hear it in a crowd and stay silent. Whoever first started it in an England context understood something fundamental about collective emotion.
Other nations have their anthems: France have their Marseillaise, Brazil their samba rhythms, Italy their operatic roars. England, characteristically, have borrowed a song from Manchester about an ambiguous “you” and made it theirs entirely.
Whether Wonderwall survives the next tournament or gets replaced by something from a 2024 playlist nobody agrees on yet remains to be seen. But for now, it’s ours.
