“Until that point [football] was all very laddish. After World in Motion everybody got a bit loved-up with it” — Steven Morris, drummer and percussionist of New Order   New Order. with John Barnes and Keith Allen for World in Motion, photo by Kevin Cummins When Franklin Foer published a collection of essays called How Football Explains the World over twenty years ago, entanglements of global corporations, criminal enterprises and sports teams seemed newly alarming. Covering “the consequences of migration, the persistence of corruption, and the rise of powerful new oligarchs”, his book documented the violence of racist hooligans and argued for nationalism as the cure for tribalism. If those slopes seemed slippery then….  But does football (or soccer, in Foer’s original American title) explain the world, even now? For most Americans, it does not. Those of us raised in the sport can be convinced, for better or worse, every four years: Power, Corruption, Lies, and all the rest. During the 1990 World Cup Italia, both US and English football fans and lovers of 80s synthpop had reason to celebrate what many still call the greatest Cup in history. Not only did my friends and I get to see an American national team in a World Cup, something that hadn’t happened since 1950, but New Order and a handful of English national team players gave us the greatest World Cup football anthem ever, 1990’s World in Motion. So what if the US team got trounced; it didn’t matter. We moved on and chanted, with blissfull abandon, the syllabic monstrosity ‘Eng-ger-land,’ soundtracked by the godparents of both post-punk and UK rave.     If New Order felt they’d thrown away the last of their serious cred for a chance at football greatness, well, they achieved it. World in Motion became the band’s only number one hit, gaining what no other sport-themed song has: mass appeal. For Joy Division fans, who learned, like the band, to move between the worlds of punk and dance, the song was hardly (as Bernard Sumner joked) ‘the last straw’.  For one thing, New Order’s football anthem about love interrupted the bitterest guitarist/ bassist feud since Pink Floyd’s Gilmour/Waters. Never one to sugarcoat, Peter Hook remembers the sessions as a rare highlight of the time: “It actually brought us together because we hadn’t had a great time doing [1989’s] Technique. We were basically splitting up and we came back together to do World in Motion.” The four stuck it out for one more record together, Republic, but the World Cup single ended their iconic association with Factory. The label went bankrupt two years later.   Peter Hook (second to left) and members of the 1990 English national football team express themselves in some casual gear. Image: Getty The pairing of New Order and the English national team came about through machinations of Football Association press officer David Bloomfield and Factory founder Tony Wilson, who underwrote the studio good vibes.  “It got very ribald. Tony turned up with a huge bag of suspect stuff and then it slowly went downhill. It sort of plateaued a little bit when the players arrived to sing, but then accelerated because everybody started drinking” —Peter Hook Luckily, the music was largely composed already, from previous soundtrack work by Steven Morris and Gillian Gilbert as The Other Two. Only six English players showed up, thinking the session would be another group sing-along like World Cup anthems of the past: fun to chant in the stands but otherwise unlistenable. They were more or less bribed, each handed an envelope with £200 cash, and were shocked to find a real band in the studio. “If I thought it was going to be the same as the usual crap why bother?” said John Barnes, the song’s breakout rap star. “But it was alright!” Barnes would take his place music history by delivering the song’s rap, an afterthought mostly contributed by co-lyricist and comedian Keith Allen to compensate for the limited player involvement. (The players had a ‘rap-off,’ with especially hilarious turns by Paul Gascoigne — three bottles of champagne deep — and mouth-full-0f-gravel Peter Beardsley. Hear both their takes here). Peter Hook and the Light, featuring John Barnes, “World in Motion,” June 2026     Barnes remembers, ‘[‘World in Motion’] wasn’t a typical “here we go”, arms-around-each-other football song. it was a proper group and that is why the song was good’. He still dines out on his performance with athletic dance moves, a massive grin, and such disarming good humor, it’s impossible to imagine someone committing an act of football violence on his watch. (His turn on Celebrity Big Brother is especially charming). Allen’s rap served as a sort of f*ck you to the FA, who rejected his earlier proposed chorus of ‘E for England’ because of the drug reference. The comedian, who once play Tony Wilson on TV, had been brought to the project to help a band who weren’t, it turned out, huge football fans. He also served as a convenient alibi, notes Morris: ‘If everything went pear shaped, we could say it was a joke,’ which it more or less was… for Allen. If you break it down, most of it is either homosexual innudendo or drug taking innuendo. ‘You’ve got to hold and give and do it at the right time. You can be slow or fast, but you must get to the line’. It’s all about referencing drugs and homosexual activity. I always wanted ‘It’s one on one’ which was the big thing of the day, ‘Are you on one? Are you on one?’ —Keith Allen The rap also proudly declared, ‘We ain’t no hooligans, this ain’t a football song.’ What kind of song is it? It’s a global dance song. The lyrics, penned by Sumner and Allen, declare the prime mover of the world to be ‘Love,’ not the ‘We’ the FA wanted in the chorus. (Sumner and Allen refused to yield.) Yes, it’s a song for England, but that’s not what it’s all about. Bernard Sumner and John Barnes on pitch. Images: Getty As Steven Morris would reflect, ‘World in Motion’ arrived not only at a turning point for underdog Americans and English football’s reputation, but for the sport as a whole. Football was ‘until that point.. all very laddish. After “World in Motion” everybody got as bit loved-up with it.’ It was a moment when it seemed like bad breakups like New Order’s impending split could be healed with the right music. For a few weeks ‘World in Motion’ was that song, so danceable, chantable, and completely subversive that it found fans in every nation and did something that seems unthinkable today: got millions of people around the world to chant for England.  The post Love Over Lads: New Order’s ‘World In Motion’ Takes on the Hooligans at World Cup Italia ’90 appeared first on Flashbak.