Every fortnight we cover the best and worst football songs from every club in the UK from our book ‘The Sound Of Football: Every Club, Every Song’. You can buy it here

AFC Bournemouth

Nickname: The Cherries

Ground: Vitality Stadium

Stadium Capacity: 9,287

Song: Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond

The club’s official name is AFC Bournemouth. It should appear at the front of any alphabetical list of English clubs. However, this order is often ignored, and clubs like Barnsley, Birmingham, Blackburn, Blackpool, and Bolton are listed first. We have chosen to list them by AFC so that it’s in front of Arsenal and Aston Villa – at least until those clubs, like a crafty tradesperson looking to get a higher listing, change their names to AAArsenal and AAAston Villa.

Musically, Bournemouth doesn’t deserve a high position on our list. The club doesn’t have a significant song to call its own – though not through lack of trying, most recently by looking for inspiration from across the Atlantic. 

The baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, plays Neil Diamond’s classic ‘Sweet Caroline’ during every game at their stadium, Fenway Park. The sing-along song has become such a Fenway staple that the Red Sox mutes the sound for parts as fans know the lyrics off by heart.

Neil Diamond’s song was inspired by a photograph of Caroline Kennedy, daughter of US President John F Kennedy, that the singer saw in a magazine while staying at a hotel in Memphis*. Diamond wrote the song in an hour; it changed his life. He reignited his career and sold a million copies in the US.

Today, ‘Sweet Caroline’ is in every Boston bar, and it doesn’t matter if the Red Sox are winning, hurting, triumphant, or reeling when you’re down, and you sing it; it will lift you up. It’s Boston’s theme song. But not Bournemouth’s song, no matter how many times played it before kick-off.

This is not the first time a song has failed to connect with fans. Even a song written for the club couldn’t connect. 

In the early 1970s, the club would play  ‘Up The Cherries,’ an original song, when the team ran out at the start of matches. The song borrowed the club’s nickname – The Cherries – for its title. It was a nickname based on both the club’s cherry red striped shirts and the cherry orchards that once stood near its ground. However, surprise, surprise, it never caught on with supporters. 

It is the same story for one of the Bournemouth’s cup final songs. In 2003, the song ‘Go South,’ a reworking of the Village People’s ‘Go West’, was released before the Division 3 play-off final against Lincoln City. The song predicted the Bournemouth would win – and it was right. Bournemouth was a comfortable winner, beating Lincoln 5 – 2 and setting a record for the highest number of goals scored in a play-off final. Yet, even then, despite soundtracking this big victory, the song didn’t catch on. 

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