AS THE football anthem That's The Thing About Football approached its 30-year anniversary, a younger member of the Coodabeen Champions radio show predicted to singer and songwriter Greg Champion that nostalgia around the song was only going to grow.
Written in 1994 before becoming a fixture of Channel Seven football broadcasts through the second half of the decade, the song was synonymous with the game for young fans who are now roughly in their 40s.
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On the eve of this year's finals and the 30th anniversary of the song's release, it's one of the reasons Champion believes there has been increasing interest and nostalgia around the song, as predicted by fellow Coodabeen Andy Bellairs.
"Andy was half our age, and he said to me a couple of years ago that the people who grew up listening to The Thing About Football in the mid-1990s are now moving into positions of power," Champion told AFL.com.au this week.
"So that song is only going to grow in nostalgia. Since he said it, it's proved to be the case with a lot of nostalgia and enquiries about the song."
A key to the enduring nature of That's The Thing About Football is the timeless themes and lyrics, which can be applied just as easily to football in 2024 as they could in 1994.
While Champion's main craft in the 1990s was writing parody songs about the teams and heroes in the League, he took a different approach when it came to creating an anthem.
"The heroes of the day were Paul Roos and Gary Pert and Peter Daicos and Robbie Flower, and I'd written songs about players and teams before. That's what the game is about really," Champion said.
"But when it comes to a potential anthem, you've got keep it general to make it timeless. If I put them in, it arguably dates the song, so I tried to follow that idea."
The seeds of Champion's anthem were sown when the musician was watching a game and said to himself after a passage of play, 'well, that's the thing about football'.
The phrase went straight onto a list of ideas he kept, and after a period of time he got around to turning the little nugget into a song.
He took the idea to Mike Brady, who wrote the enduring 1979 football anthem Up There Cazaly, and the pair polished the song before lining up musicians for a recording session.
The lyrics remained incomplete, however, the night before recording, prompting Champion to contact Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly explaining the situation.
"I was given a fax number, and that night I faxed Paul Kelly in Adelaide and said, 'I've got a session in the morning, and I don't really have my lyrics together'," Champion said.
"When I got up in the morning, there were three verses and 12 lines from Kelly, much to my shock.
"I took one line and I built a verse from that, and then we recorded the song with Brady producing and lending his great voice to the song."
Champion still needed a lucky break to take his song to the football masses, drawing on his role as a radio broadcaster with the Coodabeens and his media and football relationships.
"It was different times, and you could ring up [AFL chief executive] Ross Oakley and you could ring up Gordon Bennett, who was the head of Channel Seven Sport, and say, 'I'm sending you over a song'," Champion said.
The song didn't catch Bennett's interest initially, but the broadcast boss admitted he hadn't listened to it all and was urged by Champion to go back and listen to the song's final crescendo.
"He called me back half an hour later and said, 'I like it now', and within maybe a week, it was introduced on a football broadcast," he said.
"It was the right time and the right place."
