Why football legend hit out at 'arrogant' Three Lions song - as it's re-released (again)

It's three decades since Frank Skinner, David Baddiel and The Lightning Seeds famously sang that football was "coming home" at Euro 96.

Now, after another "30 years of hurt" have passed without a major trophy for the men's national team, Three Lions is being re-released again, in time for the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico.

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But not everyone is happy about the song being belted out at England games for another tournament.

Dutch football legend Ruud Gullit has branded Three Lions "arrogant", saying England does not "own football". Meanwhile, opposition fans have described the track as in "bad taste" and even suggested there is a "mistaken" claim in the lyrics.

So how do supporters of arguably England's fiercest rivals – Scotland and Germany – really feel about the song?

Michael McEwan, a journalist at Scotland's Tartan Army Magazine, said fans of the song need to "let it lie", arguing the England team – hoping to win their first World Cup since 1966 – are not what they used to be.

Harking back to when the song was first released in May 1996 during the Britpop era, McEwan said: "I know why they were doing it, but I think it was done in bad taste.

"I just think they were too full of themselves to write that song."

On the track's re-release, he said: "If they don't win at this World Cup, will they put it out at the European Championships as well? I think they should just drop it."

McEwan said he thinks the track has lost its energy after three decades, and it's time to "give it a rest, guys".

'Mistaken claim' in song

Tartan Army spokesperson Hamish Husband said the Three Lions song is tainted by its "mistaken" claim that England is the home of football.

Husband argues that it was instead Scotland that taught the world how to play the modern passing game.

He referenced the 19th-century "Scotch professors", a set of footballers who have been credited as pioneers of the modern passing game at a time when players ran with the ball until they were tackled, with the revolutionary new tactics taken on by Scotland before spreading across Europe, South America and Asia.

"It was the travellers that worked the factories of the UK that took football to the world – not England," Husband added.

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Uli Hesse, a German football journalist and life-long Borussia Dortmund fan, said Three Lions was popular when it was first released because it was "so English", adding that England is not just the home of football but also the "home of pop culture and pop music".

But Hesse says that in Germany the song has now lost its connection with England – and has instead become a general football song, like You'll Never Walk Alone, "which they still play at my club Dortmund, even though I don't like it".

Hesse said he can't understand why the song has been called "arrogant" but he can see why it might be considered a burden, after Gullit described it as "England's nemesis" in an interview with The Sun.

He added: "It was kind of ironic... and light-hearted to remember people in 1996 where England hadn't won anything in 30 years. But now it's 60 years. Maybe the joke's getting a bit thin."

"But you and I, we know it's all going to end this summer," said Hesse, "thanks to a German coach (Thomas Tuchel), who will then, as [former England international] Tony Woodcock tells me, be knighted.

"Then we can stop singing it, or maybe with the new lyrics."

'People walk past my window singing it'

Three Lions first topped the UK charts in 1996 and again in 1998 when an updated version was released for the World Cup in France.

Baddiel, Skinner and Ian Broudie of The Lightning Seeds teamed up again for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, recording a festive version of the song titled Three Lions (It's Coming Home For Christmas).

Broudie told Sky News in 2022 that he loves the fact that it is still the defining track for England fans.

"People walk past my window late at night singing it; it just makes me smile," he said.

Writing in the Standard in 2021, Baddiel said: "We wanted to write a song about the real experience of being a football fan, which is not, with the greatest respect to various previous anthems, that we're going to win it, this time, more than any other time, but more likely that we're going to lose."

Speaking about the song, he told the BBC last month: "It doesn't bother me that even though I've done many other things in my career, when I'm dead they'll say 'best known for co-creating the England football anthem Three Lions'.

"I think it's a fantastic example of something that wasn't designed to be a really popular thing.

"There was no top-down element of it. It was just three blokes trying to write about football, and it caught fire."

(c) Sky News 2026: Why football legend hit out at 'arrogant' Three Lions song - as it's re-released (again)