Artists including New Order, Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles have entered the maze and found their way out the other side. Others - such as Madonna, U2 and the Beatles - have notoriously crashed on the rocks, ending promising careers and spending decades wandering along pop music's abandoned outer banks. The latest big success story is, of course, us. Here's how we did it.
Perfect lyrics
The lyrics to a great football anthem must beg listeners to sing along, which means they need to be catchy and easy to memorise. But that's not enough: they also have to be informative and accurate. We took our starting point from the most basic act of football, kicking the ball. We decided to say most of it a few times: "Kicking the, kicking the, kicking the ball." So far so good - great, even. But where to go from there? Well, what's the best thing you can do with the ball, when you kick it? Our assumption was "get it away from you". But we decided not to rely on our own understanding of the game - this is a song that ideally will represent an entire nation, after all! - and so we asked hundreds of footballers, from amateurs to pros to lifetime fans. The picture that began to emerge was quite a surprise: for the most part they agreed that the best thing you can hope to do when you strike the ball with your foot is to put the ball in the goal. With this more subtle understanding of the game in place, completing the central lyric of our anthem was child's play: "Kicking the, kicking the, kicking the ball. Kicking it, kicking it into the goal."
