To the tune of Lord of the Dance (Sydney Carter, 1963).

Sol, Sol, wherever you may be, You’re on the verge of lunacy, And we don’t give a f*** when you’re hanging from a tree, Judas c*** with HIV

Now, that’s not very nice, is it? And also, for those who take their history seriously, a little mystifying. It was sung by Spurs fans towards Portsmouth’s Sol Campbell and refers, without a great deal of sympathy or support, to Sol’s alleged mental frailties. But it is the last line that interests me. Tottenham’s hardcore supporters refer to themselves as the Yids, which is a derogatory name for Jewish people. Their hooligan “firm” is known as the Yid Army and there is an embracing of Jewish culture, even an identification with Israel.

In which case, how do we explain that slighting reference to Judas Iscariot? The story of Judas has often been cited as an early example, if not a precursor, of Christian anti-Semitic propaganda. Certainly Jewish authorities would suggest that Judas (deriving, obviously again, from Judaea, home of the Jews) did not betray Jesus Christ for pecuniary gain, but because he had deep misgivings about Jesus’s messianic ambitions. The betrayal for money was pinned on him much later, as a stick to beat the Jews. Perhaps the Spurs fans were being ironic, then, or even meant the reference in a kindly manner - Sol as a misunderstood and unfairly maligned hero.

Although I grant you that the word directly after would tend to cast doubt on such a thesis. Anyway, if I’m honest, I think that entire last line was rather overegging the pudding and even detracts from the preceding lines.

None of this will be considered in depth by the Football Association, I suppose - although they do intend to undertake a Derridean textual analysis of the song. Was it racist? If it were racist, rather than simply horrible, then Spurs are really for it. That reference to Sol “hanging from a tree” - was that a conscious evocation of that awful totemic image of the lynching of black people in the deep south between the end of the civil war and the 1960s when, at last, the civil rights movement, with great bravery, opened the eyes of the world to the chronic injustice and persecution endured by African-American citizens. Strange Fruit, Billie Holiday, Rosa Parks, the KKK, Tuscaloosa, Meridian and Little Rock, George Wallace in a wheelchair running for president - all that stuff? Or was it more that “hanging from a tree” rhymed nicely with “wherever you may be”? We await the verdict with great interest.

The Sol Campbell song is impossible to defend; but then an awful lot of football chants are difficult to defend. They have become nastier and more personal of late and we could argue all year about why. Perhaps we are much nastier people these days; or the gulf between players and supporters has become so grotesque the players are no longer viewed as anything other than fair game for an unlimited level of abuse. We pay their obscene wages; they repay us with a total and utter lack of loyalty, so they get what they deserve. Maybe it’s both of these things.

They have also become much less overtly racist - you would not hear, these days, the Boro fans singing, to the tune of Brown Girl In The Ring, “Nigger on the pitch”, as I remember from the late 1970s. Don’t need much textual analysis of that one, do you? But the central point is the songs have always relied upon vituperation and invective at their most pointed and spiteful; the perceived weakness or vulnerability of the player, or opposing sets of fans, identified and milked for all it is worth, no matter how vile when considered in cold print.

Victoria Beckham’s supposed sexual predilections, for example, whenever David Beckham is playing. And poor Paul Peschisolido, married to Karren Brady, who was forced to endure “You’re s*** and your wife’s a slag.” To the tune of Go West, since you asked. Chelsea fans singing to the Cardiff supporters “Aberfan, Aberfan, Aberfan,” in the early 1980s; taunts to Manchester United fans about Munich, to Liverpool fans about Hillsborough (and indeed, from my fellow Millwall fans, about Ken Bigley). Gillingham’s supporters get a quick blast of “You can shove your lucky heather up your a***” and also the more explicit: “You can’t read, you can’t write, you wear gold and Nikes. You are all from Gillingham and you are f****** pikeys.” I suspect the BBC’s Traveller Unit and the Equality and Human Rights Commission would find that racially offensive.

Last week, at Swindon, sitting among the Millwall throng, I thoroughly enjoyed our acute sociological observation that the home fans seemed to have spent an awful lot of time, but not much money, in Matalan. Extreme cruelty has always been a feature of football chants. General abuse, too - at one of my first football games I remember singing along with my dad, to the familiar tune of Cwm Rhondda, “Billy Bremner, Billy Bremner, you’re not fit to wipe my a***.” West Ham think Millwall are pikeys; Millwall call Gillingham pikeys. I assume Gillingham call someone else pikeys, although god knows who.

Liverpudlians are eviscerated for being impoverished, whining thieves; for a long while after the Cleveland sex abuse scandal fans of northeastern clubs were invited to “f*** your children, eat your pies, doo-dah, doo-dah.” Spurs fans are greeted by the low hiss of the gas chambers - nothing, absolutely nothing, is out of bounds. And you may find it all thoroughly objectionable, especially if you are one of those arriviste supporters who has taken an interest in football only in the past 10 years or so, but it has always been the case.

You can view it as something that must be stamped out immediately, which is how Fifa view the bigoted, pro-loyalist sectarian chants of Rangers supporters, or a valuable contribution to oral folklore, which is how Fifa view the bigoted, pro-Fenian sectarian chants from Celtic supporters. It is uncivilised behaviour, by the politically correct standards of our time. Although you will note that those Spurs fans sang the PC-approved phraseology that Sol Campbell was “with HIV”, rather than “suffering from HIV”. Unless they just couldn’t get that to scan. Maybe the FA will deliberate on that, too.