In the States, this would be considered odd.

Crowds at major sports events … breaking into song during a game.

Singing happens, now and then, at U.S. stadiums. But it usually is scheduled and involves two songs — the national anthem and “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”.

In England and Wales and Scotland and Ireland … the songs at soccer matches are spontaneous, generally primitive and often obscene.

And my theory is … Britons are inveterate singers, and since they no longer go to church, where they can sing to their hearts’ content while sitting among peers, they now sing at their modern-day cathedrals — soccer stadiums.

I have been thinking about this for years, and it came to the forefront the other day when Manchester City fans sang a song set to the tune of Tom Jones’s famous murder ballad, Delilah.

And it goes like this:

Ya-ya-yaaa-ya Toure

Ya ya-yaaa-ya Toure.

(The refrain to the Jones tune goes … “My, my, my, Delilah; why, why, why, Delilah?”)

Yaya Toure is a City midfielder from Cameroon whose family name is pronounced “Tour-eh”.

There are thousands of soccer “songs”. It seems some are made up during matches. One involved the player Jason Puncheon taking a bathroom break in the middle of a match.

I doubt long hours of puzzling over lyrics went into the song/chant: “We lose every week, we lose every week! You’re nothin’ special, we lose every week!”

Here and here and here are YouTube links to “soccer songs”. Some are stupid. Several are sung to the same short bit of tune.

Perhaps the most famous of all soccer songs is Liverpool’s take on “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the sappy 1945 musical “Carousel”.

(But to hear Liverpool’s fans sing it is aural torture. See for yourself. Concept nice, with a message from Liverpool fans to their players, but the execution is awful.)

Soccer songs … here to stay until Britons go back to singing hymns in church.