Ranking every song used for Sky Sports’ Premier League intros – Celeste, Kasabian, Moloko…
Celeste’s Stop This Flame has been chosen as Sky Sports’ Premier League intro song for a fifth season running – but where does it rank among their best intro songs?
There have been some memorable tracks chosen as the soundtrack for Sky Sports’ Premier League coverage over the years, while there have also been one or two we wouldn’t blame you for forgetting entirely.
We’ve not included all the songs/intros for you here, as it would’ve been far too clunky to do so. But we can point you in the direction of a Vimeo compilation from 1992 to 2001, a YouTube compilation from 2005 to 2023 and a handy Spotify playlist of all the songs.
Note: We’re not including Monday Night Football here, which sort of feels distinct, or Sky Sports’ other football coverage – like the League Cup, Football League or England – with apologies to Texas and Oasis. We’re talking proper flagship weekend coverage only – if the match was billed ‘Football Special’ or ‘Super Sunday’ then the intro song features here.
13. Ford Generic Guitar Track (2003-04)
We’ve toiled to find the artist or track ID and got nowhere. Shazam throws up nothing.
So we’ve got no choice to bow down to the apparent knowledge of YouTube user @classicfootballbroadcastin4318 – that the choice for 2003-04 was not a commercially available track.
Pfft. C’mon, Sky. Do better. A reminder of just how prominent the Ford branding was back in the day.
The snippet of the track itself is high-octane enough but kind of nu-metaly? Very of its time, very much not Premier League.
12. Ronan Keating – Lovin’ Each Day (2001-02)
Now onto a pick for the mums.
This one kind of has the light and breezy tone required but it’s just so monumentally naff, isn’t it? No wonder it only lasted a season.
11. Labrinth – Something’s Got to Give (2019-20)
Another one-season wonder, this one is totally forgettable. The only track on this list that we swear we’ve never heard before in our lives, except we must have done because it soundtracked an entire season of Sky Sports’ Premier League coverage.
Come to think of it, that vocal breakdown when the title card comes up is sort of familiar. To be fair, given everything else that was going on in 2019-20 it’s probably not the only thing we’ve memory-holed.
10. Dario G – Carnaval de Paris (2002-03)
Is this footbally? Absolutely.
But it’s pure World Cup, having been specifically recorded and released for France ’98. This is all about one special month of sunshine from June into July, not run-of-the-mill December meetings between Everton and Tottenham.
The vibes are all wrong. No wonder it was quickly canned.
9. Tom Grennan – Found What I’ve Been Looking For (2017-19)
Charmless, sorry.
It’s an earworm – but an annoying one. Guilty of that late 2010s vocal affectation adopted by reality tv hopefuls and buskers trying too hard.
It does feel Premier Leaguey, at least. We’ll give it that.
8. Sigma – Higher (ft. Labrinth) (2015-17)
We’re now depressingly old enough where noughties nostalgia is a thing, but we’re not quite there with the 2010s.
We’re probably just being jaded but the mid-2010s feel like a cultureless void of grey Tory austerity.
But if there was a sound of that era, this was probably it. Chart-friendly quasi drum & bass with a catchy hook. Does that mean it’s good? Nah.
Bonus points for soundtracking Leicester’s title victory.
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7. Andrea Johnson – Glorious (2000-01)
In retrospect, this is a bit of an odd choice. Yet it somehow works.
It’s probably pure nostalgia talking. You couldn’t find a more middle-of-the-road early noughties pop tune, and yet those strings instantly evoke images of Mark Viduka, Marcus Stewart and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink.
6. Celeste – Stop This Flame (2020-)
What’s the opposite of recency bias? When Sky Sports eventually decides to move on, we might think more favourably about this one.
But here, in 2024 – with a fifth straight season the joint-longest reign – we’re desperate for something else. Anything else. Like when you come to the end of a Jet2 flight and you can’t remember a time in your life that you weren’t listening to Jess Glynne’s Hold My Hand.
It’s undeniably very Premier League, and that extended instrumental they use in the background while David Jones is talking us through the latest narratives is effective. We can’t pretend it doesn’t work, especially when three decades in Sky Sports have refined their package to something monumentally slick.
If Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City juggernaut go and make it five Celeste-soundtracked titles in a row, we suspect people might not have that much fondness for this period. Wine and roses for City fans, gruel for everybody else.
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5. Tinie Tempah – Written In The Stars (ft. Eric Turner) (2011-15)
Siri, play the definitive Barclays era theme.
This is Luis Suarez mercilessly slaughtering Norwich. Agueeerrroooo. Eden Hazard, Mesut Ozil, Gareth Bale and all the rest. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
It’s almost enough for us to forgive the fact that the main hook is from some no-mark American singer that didn’t really do anything else of note.
4. Fatboy Slim – Right Here, Right Now (1997-00)
Here’s where our research gets a bit sketchy. We don’t quite remember this song for three straight years, but every Sky Sports compilation we’ve found suggests it features between the original ‘Here We Go’ song and Andrea Johnson in 2000. Correct us if we’re wrong.
Either way, this is a proper football track. Captures the zeitgeist of late 90s football culture as Arsene Wenger’s nascent Arsenal emerged to do battle with Sir Alex Ferguson’s all-conquering Manchester United.
If we’re being fussy, this one loses a point or two for being too big and recognisable in its own right. Almost every other song on this list would be instantly associated with Sky Sports’ Premier League coverage. You wouldn’t say that for this, would you?
READ: A definitive ranking of every football song we could think of
3. ‘Here We Go’ song (1992-97)
A little secret for you here – the Planet Football office is staffed almost entirely by millennials. Gen Z trends confuse and terrify us in equal measure.
We’re not at the older end of the millennial scale, so while we came of age during the Richard Keys & Andy Gray years, we must admit… we don’t actually remember this one. At least this writer doesn’t, having not had Sky Sports in the house until much later on. We do very much recognise it from Keys & Gray Corner on the Football Cliches podcast, though.
Endearingly tacky. An inexorable part in the early years of Sky Sports’ rise to a footballing broadcasting powerhouse. Credit where it’s due.
2. Kasabian – Club Foot (2009-11)
We remember buying the NME when Kasabian first emerged with a kind of quasi-guerrilla imagery behind them – shut up, grandpa.
Ahem, moving on, they naturally grew into lad-rock arena fillers as the years progressed, while early hit Club Foot and its distinctive distorted bass riff had a kind of staying power that saw it selected as Sky Sports’ Premier League intro theme a half-decade after it was first released.
A lot of their landfill indie imitators and the accompanying Soccer AM banter are best left in the past, but there’s no denying that Club Foot just sounds big. Works perfectly paired with the Sky Sports hype machine.
Thousands and thousands of hours of football, each more climactic than the last.
Constant, dizzying, 24-hour, year-long, endless football.
Every kick in it massively mattering to someone, presumably.
1. Moloko – Time is Now (2004-2009)
There’s a Mandela effect thing going on where this was apparently Moloko’s biggest chart hit. It reached No.2 in the charts, while Sing It Back reached No.45 upon its initial release and peaked at four.
We’re not having that. Sing It Back was the ubiquitous floor-filler. Time Is Now was the archetypal Sky Sports intro song and we can’t possibly imagine hearing it in any other context.
“The time is…now,” ahead of Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea vs Rafael Benitez’s Liverpool. Slightly hungover on the sofa a Sunday afternoon. A cagey low-scoring match that, in all honesty, kind of looks more like pub football than the sport as we know it in 2024.
Take us back.