Make it short, make it brutal, make it sing

I saw a column in The New Statsesman about ‘the funniest football chants’.

The best one ever, apparently, was about Bobby Zamora. Imagine these words, sung to the tune of That’s Amora.

“When the ball hit’s your head and you’re sat in Row Z, that’s Zamora.” This, according to the article, was a song aimed at one time Tottenham player Bobby Zamora.

The writer had obviously made an honest mistake, because he was quoting from an article that appeared in a tabloid newspaper. Which in turn had used a bit of poetic license, attributing it to the wrong fans, to make the Zamora chant into a better story.

There were three things wrong about the story. 1. No crowd had ever chanted this witty riposte. 2. The song was made up by a Crystal Palace fan. 3. I made the whole thing up.

(I’ve got the email to prove this too)

I'm less worried about the half truths than the fact I never got the credit for them.

So, what are you going to do? I suppose I could always use the anecdote as an intro to a piece about headlines and sub editing. Because composing a football song is a lot like creating a headline. You need to tell the story in as few words as possible.

If you worked in IT marketing, you might describe this discipline as “Proactively Engaging the Reader With Sticky Content While Committing to Best Practise Simplifisational Process Standards.” Or as a sub-editor might say, keep it simple.

Consider the chant: When the ball hits your head and you’re sat in row Z, that’s Zamora. Tells you a story in a single sentence. It’s snappy and it keeps to the exact rhythm of the popular song.

It’s a lie, of course. Zamora is a brilliant player. But there you go, football is as partisan and mindless as IT marketing, but terrace wit gets to the point quicker. Which is why it’s more effective.

The point is, a song has to be simple to get it adopted by your target audience. I know how hard this is, because I used to try making up all kinds of chants, that got ignored by other Palace fans. I thought they were the most devastatingly witty chants ever, but all the mass of Palace fans want to sing is “Eagles, Eagles” over and over again. Still, what are you going to do? If that’s what people want, that’s what sells. You can’t argue with the market. So Eagles Eagles it is.

That’s why my Bobby Zamora chant never took off. Although it was obviously pretty impressive on paper. I can take some comfort in that.