You're Not Singing Anymore - Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2025

When you picture a football chant echoing through the stands, whose face do you see belting it out? Chances are, it’s not a woman - let alone a woman in a football shirt and Morris dancing socks. You’re Not Singing Anymore flips that image on its head. At a time when football is dominated by state-owned clubs and corporate branding, this play recentres the game as something rooted in community. 

Playwright Minnie Birch, performing alongside Kathleen Pilkington, brings the experience of lower-league football to life through “Nowhere FC,” a fictional team that feels instantly recognisable to anyone who has ever stood on the terraces. Their stories tap into the small rituals such as going to matches with your grandfather, wearing the same scarf, repeating the same pre-game routines—that make football more than a sport. That universality is key: football should be for everyone. Yet, as Pilkington reminds us, that’s not always the case. Sexism and abuse still shadow the experiences of fans in the stands.

Against this backdrop, Birch shares moments of inclusion and solidarity such as a refugee welcomed into the Nowhere FC fold “as one of their own,” and the unfurling of the trans flag with the declaration: “All women belong in sport.” It’s a powerful reminder that football’s beating heart lies not in billion-pound sponsorship deals but in the people who gather, sing, and believe together.

Birch and Pilkington weave football’s musical heritage into the show with real warmth, performing chants and terrace songs on acoustic guitar, banjo, andthose Morris dancing socks with bells jingling at their ankles. From Tottenham Hotspur to Birmingham City, the setlist spans the familiar anthems still heard on match days to songs dating back more than a century.

But these aren’t performed as throwaway novelties. Instead, each number is rooted in its community and tracing where it came from, why it mattered, and how such chants can unite a crowd of strangers into a single voice. Their harmonies are tender, playful, and heartfelt, reminding us that football songs are as much folk tradition as they are fandom.

There’s something quietly moving about hearing one of your own club’s chants lifted out of the stands and performed with such care. In their hands, what might seem ordinary becomes something rare and beautiful and a living archive of football’s collective spirit.

Lee Hutchison

4/5

(This play was viewed on the last days of it's festival run)