A notification on my smartwatch warns me that I’m in a loud environment, and I’m not surprised. Casemiro just played an impudent no-look pass into the penalty area. His Brazilian compatriot, Matheus Cunha, receives the ball on the half-turn and wallops it with a vengeance into the top corner. I’m at Old Trafford, and Manchester United just went 2-0 up against Fulham.
The match-day crowd has become a sea of twirling scarves and flailing limbs, and I’m swept along with it, hugging strangers while shredding my vocal cords. As the celebrations die down and the teams head to the centre circle for the restart, a momentary lull falls over the Stretford End. There’s a popular song that fans at Old Trafford sing at glorious times like this. It goes: “We’ve seen it all, we’ve won the lot, we’re Man United, and we’re never gonna stop.”
I’ve never done this before, but the half-time refreshments and the excitement of Cunha’s goal has lent me some rare courage. “We’ve seen it all, we’ve won the lot …” I begin to sing, but no one joins in. I trail off, my cheeks redder than United’s jerseys. I can feel people giving me awkward side-eyes, and hear stifled snickering to my rear.
Moments later, the chant is belted out by a bloke standing somewhere behind me, and the whole Stretford End joins in, followed by the other three stands, save for me, as I’m preoccupied by a mild existential crisis. What does he have that I don’t? I ask myself. What does it take to get chants and songs started in the first place? Do they simply manifest by osmosis, or are they written and authorised somewhere else by committee?
If anyone knows how to get a chant off the ground, it’s Pete Boyle. Boyle is a lifelong Man Utd fan and creator of many terrace anthems. “As a kid, I was mesmerised by my first game. I was four years old with my dad in 1974. As well as the football, I was mesmerised by the colour of the scarves, the people and the songs,” Boyle says. “I had a couple of poems published as a kid. No one in my family had any sort of musical or poetry background; I just had a bit of a knack for putting words together.”
If you give Boyle a tune, he can attach lyrics to it. He has created dozens of songs over the years, many of which are still belted out to this day. Odes to players such as Eric Cantona, Gary Neville, John O’Shea, and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. He even released a few compilation CDs of his greatest terrace hits. Boyle’s most famous song is Eric the King. He presented it on the Big Breakfast in 1995 while Cantona attended court for kung fu kicking a Crystal Palace fan, conducting a small group of fans with a French baguette: “We’ll drink, a drink, a drink / To Eric the king, the king, the king / He’s the leader of our football team / He’s the greatest French Footballer / That the world has ever seen.”
