Very Specific Football Question No.32: How has Miley Cyrus's dad taken over football?

Unlucky, you’ve just become a victim of clickbait. This story contains no further photos of Miley Cyrus and doesn’t have anything to do with sexy women. But unlike the worst kind of clickbait, such as “You won’t believe how racist this woman’s breasts are” or “This cat is so cute you will die instantly”, there is at least a tenuous connection between the headline and the subject matter. Specifically, a country and western song from 1992.

If Miley’s dad, the singer Billy Ray Cyrus, tuned into the soccer game between Germany and England at Berlin’s Olympiastadion on Saturday night, which he almost certainly didn’t, then he may have been pleased – or more likely perplexed – to hear the home fans singing one of his songs. In German.

The tune of Cyrus’s early-90s hit Achy Breaky Heart reverberated around the arena throughout England’s 3-2 victory, especially when the hosts were winning, prompting outrage from the West Ham fans watching at home in Essex.

“They are singing the Payet song in German,” shrieked one on Twitter.

In fact, they were singing the Ozil song in German, which would have enraged the listening cockneys even more because Hammers fans accuse their Arsenal rivals of stealing their song about Dimitri Payet, changing the words to Mesut Ozil and claiming it as their own.

But now the Germans were at it too – and even worse they were doing it in a language that the West Ham fans couldn’t understand and therefore made it more difficult to frame their accusations of plagiarism.

So was it West Ham, Arsenal or Germany fans who came up with the chant first? Actually, it was none of them.

A more pertinent question is: why have football fans all around the world started singing a song that was rubbish when it came out in 1992, and surely has even less relevance to our lives now? A song so frivolous and inconsequential that it was covered by Alvin and the Chipmunks in 1993, reaching a disappointing 53 in the UK charts. Why are beefy Englishmen now welling up with pride and passion singing THAT?

While it is West Ham fans who appear to have propelled this chant into the mainstream with their ubiquitous Payet rendition, we have to go further back to find its origins in football.

Rather than hailing a star player, Billy Ray’s lyrics were previously more commonly used by fans as a medium to threaten civil unrest.

“Don’t sell Joe Hart,” was Manchester City fans’ version of the song when their goalkeeper was involved in contract negotiations in 2014. They added that if their Super Joey Hart was sold, the club would have “a riot on its hands”.

This threat had already been put to the test in 2013 when Cardiff City fans warned club owner Vincent Tan, “Don’t sack Mackay”. But Tan did sack Malky, and there was no riot.

There was a similar lack of violence when Newcastle sold Yohan Cabaye despite fans’ protest songs, and at Celtic when the club flogged fan favourite Paddy McCourt.

Bhoys fans’ use of the Achy Breaky chant, first heard in May 2012, seems to be one of the earliest adaptations of the song.

But it also became popular among Newcastle away fans later that year in a completely different context.

“Don’t take me home,” a song about not wanting to go to work and to drink beer instead – nowadays sung by Wales fans too - uses the Cyrus tune but with completely original lyrics.

What this demonstrates more than anything is that football fans’ musical inventiveness is one of the best things about them. They create, steal or borrow other songs with such ingenuity that often the versions heard on the terraces are unrecognisable from the original recording – a bit like all those hip-hop rappers they have these days with their sampling.

That’s how Miley Cyrus’s dad crooning some childish nonsense about his “achy breaky heart” can lead to thousands of Germans 25 years later bellowing en masse, “Wir haben Özil , Mesut Ozil. Ich glaube einfach nicht, dass Sie verstehen.”

But why this song?

It seems that the answer lies in some grainy footage of Manchester United fans in a terrible nightclub in 2010 singing, “Don’t sell my Park, my Ji-Sung Park” while the original Billy Ray Cyrus track is heard playing on the dancefloor.

This is interesting because a) It was not borne of a genuine fear that United would sell Park, and b) Phonetically these are the lyrics which most resemble those from the actual song.

In other words, Miley Cyrus’s dad has taken over football because a few years ago some Man Utd fans got drunk.

As a reward for getting this far, here’s another photo of Miley. Isn’t she silly?

Follow @darlingkevin on Twitter

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