From penalties to Pavarotti and Beckham to Bruckner: classical music and football are closer than you might think

As the World Cup gets underway, we look at the music that has soundtracked the beautiful game – and the composers who have loved it

France ’98, when Scotland last faced Morocco at a World Cup – as they do this Friday – and lost a crucial game three-nil. (John McGinn’s winner against Haiti in Boston on Sunday rewrites all the recent records and sets the team on a path to almost certain glory this time around. Obviously.)

But you could have read the runes of Scottish doom in that World Cup by the tunes that Scotland fans had in their ears. Scotland’s song that year was Del Amitri’s masterpiece of melancholy, Don’t Come Home Too Soon, the most downbeat, honest, and lyrical World Cup song ever written – alas, the team didnae listen. And there was the BBC’s World Cup titles for 1998: Fauré’s Pavane, which lifted the moodometer from melancholic all the way to apathetic. (Not that England did much better, despite the surreal street party of Vindaloo, Engerland’s unofficial anthem, and the self-satisfaction of Three Lions, they went out in the round of 16, after David Beckham’s red-card against Argentina.)
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