Singer Ed Sheeran has told football fans to be more creative with their abusive songs aimed at him while he is watching Ipswich Town.
The 34-year-old, who is a part-owner and sponsor of the relegation-threatened Premier League club, said he thought chants aimed at him from opposing fans had not been funny enough.
He told the Men In Blazers podcast: “The chants haven’t been funny enough, I need better chants when we go away. I see so much thought and preparation go into some of the rude chants, and I just feel like I haven’t got the humour.
“We were at Wolves and there was a chant saying ‘Ed Sheeran’s a c***’, and I was like ‘at least have a bit of imagination’.
“You go to Spurs and they’re singing ‘gimme, gimme, gimme a ginger from Sweden’ (to the tune of Abba’s Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! for their midfielder Dejan Kulusevski), and you’re like, someone has put some thought into that, someone has really taken their time, I want that.
“I want someone in the home fans’ pub beforehand being like, ‘lads, we’ve got it, we’ve got something to rip Sheeran apart and it’s this’.
“I want time spent on it.”
The Thinking Out Loud singer has also seen a mural of himself in an Ipswich shirt painted on a wall on Sir Alf Ramsay Way, a street near the Suffolk team’s Portman Road stadium, which he says he thought would have been defaced by now.
He added: “I’ve got to be honest, I’m surprised it hasn’t been defaced by now, I thought there’d be a cock drawn on it at some point, but yeah, it’s been clean of cock for all this time.
“That sort of stuff is not what you do it for, you obviously feel a bit uncomfortable with the element of it. It’s a bit like I don’t know whether I’ve deserved that or whatever, but it’s there.
“I feel very loved by the community.”
Sheeran’s side currently sits nine points away from safety in the Premier League relegation zone having won just three league games all season.
The singer began his career in 2004 and has gone on to achieve 14 UK number one singles and eight UK number one albums. He is best known for songs such as Sing, Thinking Out Loud and Shape Of You.
