Audio: top 40 from Borg to Billie Jean (not Michael Jackson's lover) | Help Phill Jupitus to compile his list of the top 40 football references in music

It was Amanda Palmer, singer with The Dresden Dolls, the self-described Brechtian punk cabaret group, who proved there is an umbilical chord between sport and music by calling her new single Leeds United. In between lines about Southern Comfort and wicked sandwiches, the bisexual American maverick namechecks the much-loathed Leeds as a way of showing that a loosener from David Batty is, indeed, the food of love.

It goes back. London 0 Hull 4 was The Housemartins’ dig at the capital and was, according to Paul Heaton, the band member and Sheffield United devotee, a reference to their habit of rating gigs as football results. It was noted, ahead of yesterday’s win over West Ham United, their fourth against a London side this season, that Hull City had given the album title a degree of prescience with their penchant for beating southern softies.

So forget all those bankers cutting down on Bollinger and headlines about the end of the world. Cheer up and wallow in the two great constants of any crisis: art and sport. The FTSE may be plunging but we have still got Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard playing footsie with each other and we have still got song. Hence, as a pick-me-up-cum-cultural bailout, The Times has produced the definitive guide to sporting references in music.

The most prolific marksman is Billy Bragg. “I don’t think that shopping is a metaphor for life,” he once wrote. Of course, he didn't. He thought West Ham United were, which is why he took a bit of Wembley turf home after the 1975 FA Cup Final.

Bragg’s songs are peppered with occasional football references, notably the fabled: “How can you lie there and think of England, when you don’t even know who’s in the team?” That might have been a pithy reflection on the Soho Square love triangle involving Sven-Göran Eriksson, Faria Alam and an Ikea work-station had it not been penned years beforehand.

Possibly the finest line Bragg has written is: “There is no real substitute for a ball struck firmly and squarely.” Ray Wilkins would no doubt concur. As we speak, Bragg, a more progressive patriot than Wilkins, may even be writing a new Jerusalem about copping off with your girlfriend while the Hammers take on Hull.

The reason sport and song can work so well together is both are wells of emotion. Hence, the perfect accompaniment to Marco Tardelli’s tremulous bottom lip celebration in the 1982 World Cup final, when he appeared to have been deboned and rendered a holding amoeba, was all the more tear-jerking for getting Pavarotti to sing Nessun Dorma over slow-mo reruns.

Similarly, Pelé’s short pass to Carlos Alberto in the preamble to the greatest goal ever scored, in the 1970 final, has been likened to poetry and art. That said, any attempt to lift football to highbrow status invites mockery. While Vinnie Jones’s career was a Leonard Cohen song waiting to happen, most fans find their team names don’t scan and we have boo rather than ba-ba-baa boys.

The most popular sport for worthy songwriters is boxing, which is an arrangement born of a shared melancholy. For example, you didn’t need a kaftan to realise Bob Dylan was always more likely to pen an homage to a dead boxer than, say, Snooker Loopy.

Others just see the fun of it. Half Man Half Biscuit never made it big, partly down to synchronising gigs with Tranmere Rovers away games (not easy to crack Japan with such a philosophy), but have written about Dukla Prague and managed to rhyme Kazakhstan with Bob Wilson Anchorman. They have never won a Brit but occasionally do at Crewe.

The greats know sport can mirror life — ups, downs, pain, ambition, financial turmoil, thwarted dreams. “To be someone must be a wonderful thing, a famous footballer, a rock singer,” Paul Weller mused and thus summed up all adolescent ambition. “Pity poor Payne Stewart in a death bubble,” Manic Street Preachers added. It takes all sorts.

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