Is football coming home? Or has someone filed for it?

As England prepare to face Panama tomorrow night, a familiar sound will begin to rise again from pubs, sofas, WhatsApp groups and people who, only yesterday, claimed they were “not getting carried away this time”.

Football is coming home.

There are few phrases in sport that carry quite so much optimism, dread, irony and emotional liability in three words. For England fans, it is not merely a chant. It is a ritual. A warning sign. A collective act of hope performed by people who know exactly how badly hope can behave after the 83rd minute.

For everyone else, it’s mostly very funny.

The phrase became part of English football culture through Three Lions, the 1996 anthem by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and The Lightning Seeds. What makes it unusual is that it is not really a triumphalist song. It is, in its strange way, a song about disappointment. About near misses. About old footage. About believing again, despite having excellent legal and historical reasons not to.

That is probably why it has lasted. “Football is coming home” is not confidence. It is trauma with a chorus.

But once a phrase becomes that famous, another question begins to appear. Not the football question, which is whether England will finally go all the way. The legal question.

Can you own it?

The short answer is; possibly, but not in the way fans might imagine.

A trade mark doesn’t give someone ownership of ordinary language in every setting. It protects a sign when it distinguishes the goods or services of one business from those of another. In other words, a trade mark is not supposed to stop people singing, joking, posting memes or shouting at a television. It is supposed to help consumers identify where something has come from commercially.

A company may try to register a well-known phrase for specific goods, such as clothing, mugs, hats or other merchandise. If successful, the registration would not turn the phrase into private property across the whole of public life. It would give rights in relation to the goods and services covered by the registration, in the relevant territory, subject to the usual limits and defences.

This where slogans become difficult. Some slogans are distinctive. They point to a particular brand. Others are simply promotional, descriptive or decorative. On a T-shirt, a phrase may not tell the customer who made the shirt. It may simply tell the world what the wearer is shouting, hoping or trying to manifest before kick-off.

That is especially true in sport. Match day language belongs to the crowd before it belongs to commerce. Chants, nicknames, celebrations and phrases often move from terrace to television to social media to merchandise within hours. By the time a phrase reaches the printer, it may already have become communal property in the cultural sense, even if the legal position is more complicated.

There is also a separate copyright point. The song itself is protected. The recording, lyrics and musical composition are not free for everyone to reproduce commercially. But copyright and trade marks do different jobs. Copyright protects creative works. Trade marks protect commercial origin. A famous line from a song may raise both questions, but the answers will not be the same.

So where does that leave “football is coming home”?

Safely in the place England fans have always kept it. Somewhere between belief and catastrophe.

The phrase is valuable precisely because it does not feel like a normal brand. It feels shared. It belongs to the national pre-match condition of irrational optimism, tactical analysis from people holding paper plates and the sudden conviction that a left-back’s recovery pace may decide the destiny of a nation.

For businesses, the lesson is broader than football. A phrase can be commercially powerful long before it is legally protectable. Popularity alone does not make something a strong trade mark. In fact, if a phrase becomes too commonly used, too decorative or too closely tied to a public moment, it may be harder to claim it as a badge of origin.

For sports organisations, athletes, brands and merchandise businesses, timing matters. If a phrase, celebration or slogan is becoming commercially important, the legal strategy should not begin after it has already taken over the internet. By then, the opportunity may be crowded, contested or reduced to a licensing headache.

For England fans, however, no legal strategy is required.

We are entitled to sing it. We are entitled to believe it. We are entitled, in the final ten minutes, to sit in complete silence while remembering every tournament since 1966.

And if football does finally come home?

Someone should probably check the trade mark register before printing the T-shirts.