Vanish, oh night!
Set, stars!
Set, stars!
At dawn I will win!
I will win! I will win!

If you ask me, Nessun Dorma always has been a kind of football chant, a fancy version of Three Lions. But now, as the choirs in heaven sing out that Pavarotti’s coming home, it is time to wonder about the effect that an aria can have on a sport, and on a nation’s culture.

In football, everything changed with Nessun Dorma. It was not just the right song at the right time. What followed Nessun Dorma would not have happened anyway. The song is not a mere emblem of the unstoppable historical forces that changed the face of football.

No, it was the song itself that did the changing. The song changed the way we looked at football, understood football, related to football. Many other things followed, but the song was the prime mover of the revolution.

Nessun Dorma is an aria in Puccini’s opera Turandot. It is a classic showstopper and Luciano Pavarotti, who died yesterday, always got full value from it. And it really was the decision to use it as the signature tune for the BBC’s coverage of the World Cup of 1990 that changed everything.

Consider what was happening in football in the 1980s. If Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, could have banned the sport, she would have done so without a second’s hesitation, with the approval of most of her electorate. As it was, she tried for years to instigate a system of identity cards for football supporters, presumably because branding them would have been too complex to administer. Her favourite football club was Luton Town, which had banned away supporters.

Football and hooliganism were inseparable. The situation was out of control. Then came the dreadful trio of disasters. The first was at Bradford City’s Valley Parade ground in May 1985, when 56 people were killed after a dropped fag end set light to 20 years of accumulated rubbish beneath a football stand. Eighteen days later, 39 Juventus supporters were killed at Heysel Stadium in Brussels when a wall collapsed after a charge by Liverpool fans. Then, in April 1989, 96 people were killed at Hillsborough, largely because of the established police tradition of herding football fans into closed cages.

So no, football was not a glamorous activity. The sport itself was despised and the people who followed it were considered canaille, nothing less. English clubs were banned from European competition for five years after Heysel and the English football authorities welcomed the ban.

Football stank. You couldn’t give it away with a packet of Rice Krispies. The game was something to do with the dregs; no politician boasted about the club he supported as a boy, not if they wanted to get reelected.

It all changed in four weeks. The World Cup finals of 1990 took place in Italy: good start. The English have always loved Italy, seen it as a place full of class, warmth, sophistication, style, good living. Italian football seemed to have everything the English game lacked: wit, class, intelligence. Even football was acceptable with Italian dressing.

This was what prompted the BBC to come up with Nessun Dorma. At a stroke, football was shown as something cosmopolitan, stylish, sophisticated. Nessun Dorma is a piece of music designed to overwhelm and those who switched on to watch the football were duly overwhelmed.

It was a validation. Pavarotti’s lung-busting anthem of conquest sent out the message: it’s all right to like football. It really is acceptable to allow football to stir your spirit, lift your heart and set free your mind. Football is life-enhancing, football is another form of opera.

A writer called Pete Davies was putting together the tale of England’s adventures in Italy. He had been given unprecedented access to the team – the sort of thing that will never happen again – and had set his book up as an anathema on the state of Britain, a commination of all things Thatcherite.

It was called All Played Out, a book about a nation beset by the poll tax, interest rates and mad cows. He wrote with loathing of the English journalists who covered the event (not me, alas, I only met him briefly). It was a thesis that required a desperate performance from England – a team, a sport, an underclass, a nation, a leader that was all played out.

But it didn’t work out like that. It didn’t work out because England produced a performer of wit, style, skill, class and intelligence. Paul Gascoigne turned the nation’s gloomy expectations on their head and played with nothing less than joy as England danced to the semi-finals.

Gascoigne’s joy was a revelation to those who had been starved of football’s good things for too long. It was a reminder that sport, above all, is a joyful thing and that winning is the miracle of miracles. Vanish, oh night! Set, stars! Set, stars! At dawn – or rather, some time after supper – we shall win! We shall win! We shall win!

It was Gazza’s tears that sealed the story, making sure that this was a World Cup like no other. This was, above all, a proselytising World Cup, an event that gathered up the souls that football had lost and reconverted them. But Gazza’s tears had a meaning only because of what came before, and that was his match-winning brilliance, his impish style, his glowing belief that he could beat anybody, that with his help England could win everything.

The tears at the last made sense to us because of the joys that preceded them and the joys made sense because they were set in the context of opera. Nessun Dorma legitimised the joys of Gazza’s World Cup, emphasised them, put them into an eternal context of the wild exhilaration that the aria is all about.

Other things followed. The Taylor report, published that year, was subsequently put into practice and, with all-seat stadiums and no more cages, watching football became a – comparatively – civilised activity. Two years later, the Premier League was formed and with it the marriage with Sky television. Then came the money.

Football is now – well, we all know what football is now: a great, self-regarding, cash-mighty monster of a sport, one with priorities warped, everything skewed towards yet more cash, a sport in which a mediocrity can become sated with money in a few brief seasons but which is still capable of delivering glory, tears and joy.

Would it have happened without Pavarotti and Nessun Dorma and Italia 90? I doubt it. England’s conversion from football-haters to football-lovers was about emotion, not conviction, and it happened because that swelling song, the epic virtuosity of the singer and the crazed emotions he gave voice to formed a portal for the realisation that football is not a thing exclusive to the slums but a swelling opera that touches the hearts and souls of everyone within earshot. And if it all ends in tears, it’s all the more glorious for that. All’alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!