Manchester United’s Jukebox: A Guided Tour Through the Red Devils’ Greatest Hits

There was a time—a simpler, more innocent time—when football and the pop charts were inextricably linked. Every May, the teams who reached the FA Cup final would release a hit to go along with it.

This performance by Cockney songsters Chas & Dave and the 1987 Tottenham Hotspur squad on the iconic BBC children’s show Blue Peter was what passed for normal at the time.

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Every World Cup would come with a song from the England squad. Occasionally they would be touched by genuine musical greatness. More often they would most definitely not.

Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle took the fact that their names rhymed to all the way to Top of the Pops with the release of the 1987 smash “Diamond Lights.” This was the cultural context of the times, and Manchester United were part of the whole glorious mess.

This, of course, was not the first time football had dallied with the pop charts.

In 1976, before the glitz and glamour of the ’80s football song boom, Martin Buchan—who played 456 games for the Red Devils, per Website of Dreams—released what can only really be described as a diss track about his teammates. Imagining it in a modern context is almost impossible. 

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It is all meant in good fun, of course, but he essentially lists the failings of his fellow United players, over a jaunty, flute-heavy blues background. It’s called “The Old Trafford Blues” and it is absolutely scathing.

There’s Alex Forsyth.

He’s the one they call the ball boy’s friend.

His crosses to the far-post, land up in the Stretford End.

Easily as brutal as anything Drake wrote about Meek Mill. But he’s not done yet.

Then there’s Brian Greenhoff.

He’s got lots of skill.

And he really needs it,

To play with Gordon Hill.

Ouch. This was the 1970s equivalent of Chris Smalling releasing a record with a lyric like “Then there’s Juan Mata, he’s got great control. And he really needs it, to control Rooney’s shanked through balls.”

That would, of course, never happen. Even by the time the ’80s had arrived, Buchan’s freewheeling fun would have seemed out of place. The time had come for a glamorous new era, and United were ready.

We start with something very well-known. If you’ve been to Old Trafford, you’ve heard a version of it. It’s played at half-time and at full-time. Under Louis van Gaal, when another limp 0-0 draw had played out during the first 45 minutes, it always felt somewhat ironic. It is, of course, “Glory, Glory Man United.”

Frank Renshaw, famed as a member of ’60s British Invasion stalwarts Herman’s Hermits, is credited as the songwriter. It is probably one of the more straightforward composition jobs of his illustrious career.

Set to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” it had been released by Spurs as a B-Side to their 1981 FA Cup final song “Ossie’s Dream” and had been a chant on the terraces at United and Hibernian among others for a good length of time before that.

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This being the ’80s, it starts with a triumphant synthesised horn section, before an actual guitar—dripping in the production effects of …

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