In fact, the presence of Emma Bunton and Melanie C, alongside Glenn Hoddle and Michael Owen, cast it as a bizarre time-warp back to the 1998 World Cup, when the Spice Girls appeared on that year's song (How Does it Feel To Be) On Top of the World, led by Echo and the Bunnymen, a band who inspired the young Coldplay and therefore stand as forefathers of the uplifting-yet-slightly-melancholy big ballad genre. Football was represented not by current England stars, but by a selection of retirees – the much-maligned midfielder Carlton Palmer, who played 18 times for England in a team that failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup, is bafflingly prominent. Watching the video, you could feel the idea of the World Cup song as some sort of repository of expectation withering before your eyes.
Greatest Day, you can be sure, is unlikely to be bellowed out of pubs this June. What it isn't, though, is the kind of fists-in-the-air singalong that tends to work when sung by choirs of drunk people in football shirts. It's a perfectly serviceable representative of the uplifting-yet-slightly-melancholy big ballad that's been one of pop's default settings since Coldplay became huge enough to be worth copying.
But this year's, unveiled on Friday night's Sport Relief, is something of a nadir, a giant shrug of "Will this do?" There's no bespoke song, just a rather grim cover of Take That's Greatest Day, supervised by Gary Barlow, featuring the vocal talents of, among others, Gary Lineker, a couple of Spice Girls, Pixie Lott, Eliza Doolittle and Katy B, who must have turned up at the studio, looked around at her companions, and wondered what had possessed her management to agree to this. World Cup songs – and almost all official football songs, if we're honest – are rarely anything to celebrate.
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