We’ve already witnessed the devastation footballers can wreak upon music, and there are arguably no two nations that have done more to mesh the two art forms than Italy and England. Italy at least have a legacy as practitioners of the beautiful game, of catenaccio, Paolo Rossi and Guiseppe Meazza. England have the 442 and Andy Carroll. Let the games begin!

Italy: Gianna Nannini & Edoardo Bennato – ‘Un’estate Italiana’

It would be remiss and frankly quite rude to talk about Italian music without at least once mentioning Giorgio Moroder, one of the architects of disco and one of the greatest electronic and non-electronic musicians of all time. He also wrote the song from Top Gun. More importantly, he’s written countless theme tunes for Olympics and World Cups, including this tune from Italia ’90 which, while far from his best composition, is nevertheless about football and features some nifty prehistoric computer graphics. It was either this or Zucchero.

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England: The Farm – ‘All Together Now’

It says a lot about the hysteria that grips England each time a major finals rolls around that the entire nation ricochets wildly between almost morbid pessimism and deranged optimism before their inevitable elimination in the quarter finals having bored their way through the group stages and the odd second-round tie against a depleted Latin American minnow. So it’s funny the same sense of random scrutiny isn’t turned to the songs that soundtrack these events, such as New Order’s excruciatingly shit ‘World in Motion,’ which I won’t even insult you by linking to. Everybody knows the Farm’s ‘All Together Now’ was the real England 1990 song, and it’s no surprise that with a great song came a great tournament performance, with England finally falling to Germany in the semis before losing to, yes, Italy in the 3rd place playoff.