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Chiesa provides the perfect bridge between Liverpool old and new

Liverpool's Italian striker #14 Federico Chiesa celebrates scoring their third goal during the English Premier League football match between Liverpool and Bournemouth at Anfield in Liverpool, north west England on August 15, 2025. (Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE. No use with unauthorized audio, video, data, fixture lists, club/league logos or 'live' services. Online in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No video emulation. Social media in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No use in betting publications, games or single club/league/player publications. / (Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

ab5972e55181cc899c74fa69dbf9112eb34f973b AFP or licensors Liverpool's Italian striker #14 Federico Chiesa celebrates scoring their third goal during the English Premier League football match between Liverpool and Bournemouth at Anfield in Liverpool, north west England on August 15, 2025. (Photo by Paul ELLIS / AFP) / RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE. No use with unauthorized audio, video, data, fixture lists, club/league logos or 'live' services. Online in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No video emulation. Social media in-match use limited to 120 images. An additional 40 images may be used in extra time. No use in betting publications, games or single club/league/player publications. / (Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

The precise etymology of the song is difficult to track, but it first seemed to make it out into the wild in May deep in the bowels of Stamford Bridge. A week after they had been crowned champions, Liverpool were groggily losing to Chelsea. The travelling support could not have cared less. They were busy inside, banging on the concourse ceiling, reworking the lyrics to an old Dean Martin standard.

The object of their affection was an unlikely one. At that stage, Federico Chiesa had scored precisely two goals for Liverpool: one in the FA Cup against Accrington Stanley and a late, ultimately meaningless consolation in the Carabao Cup final. He had played fewer than 50 minutes across a whole season in the Premier League.

His transfer, a £12m roll of the dice in the summer of 2024, could not be called a resounding success. He had missed vast tracts of the season both to injury and protracted recovery from it. He had made just three starts. Two of them were in defeat, first by PSV Eindhoven and then in the humiliating FA Cup loss at Plymouth.

And yet he had, somehow, endeared himself to Liverpool’s fans. In part, it was the little things: an interview at his unveiling at which he spoke gushingly of what it meant to play for the club; the wide-eyed enthusiasm for the team he demonstrated from the substitutes’ bench; glimpses of him in training, all smiles and bonhomie. In part, perhaps it was sympathy, too, a sense that Chiesa was not struggling for any want of trying.

Either way, the updated version of “Sway” – one that features a unnecessarily confrontational account of his move from Juventus – quickly became the theme tune to Liverpool’s ceremonial procession to the title.

By the final day of the season, as Liverpool and Crystal Palace laid on a semi-competitive football match while a party rolled on around them, it was echoing around Anfield; everybody knew the words. In the celebrations that followed the final whistle that day, the Shaft cover of the song was third on the playlist, after Dua Lipa’s One Kiss and Gala’s Freed From Desire.

It was, in a way, fitting that it should have boomed out from the Kop once more on Friday, this time as a paean to what ranks as the 27-year-old’s greatest moment in England. It had been a fraught, chaotic, intensely emotional night at Anfield, one that ended with Mohamed Salah in tears on the pitch, overcome by the ongoing tributes to Diogo Jota.

It had also been a shameful one, the game pausing in the first half after Antoine Semenyo informed the referee, Anthony Taylor, that he had been racially abused by a fan. “Unacceptable in any football stadium,” a visibly angry Arne Slot said. Andoni Iraola, the Bournemouth manager, described it as “a thing that should belong to the past”. A fan was identified and led from the stadium by three police officers at half-time; the incident is now under investigation.

Amid it all, the game itself felt not like an irrelevance, but certainly a diversion. Chiesa’s intervention, that late, snatched volley to restore Liverpool’s lead, was a truly great sporting moment; it did not feel, in the circumstances, like the evening’s defining event. “In the middle of it, also there was a football match happening,” as Slot said.

The dawn of a season is always celebrated as a fresh start, a new beginning, something separate and distinct from all that went before. That is particularly pronounced at Liverpool this year given the dramatic churn in Slot’s championship-winning squad.

Everything here feels new: Liverpool have a new kit, they have £270m worth of new players – with more to come, it would appear – who have been drawn up into a new system, one that inculcates a new style of play, and one that poses new problems for Slot to solve.

The Premier League’s rolling telenovela, though, is designed to be never-ending; the boundaries between each edition have become, over the years, ever more fuzzy, ever more blurred, thanks to some combination of saturation coverage, Byzantine pre-season tours and the ongoing frenzy of the transfer market. In that sense, Chiesa’s song, an artefact of last season, provided a sort of bridge, a connection between what has been and what is to come, a link between then and now. It also offered a reminder, though, that football’s fetishisation of the new overlooks the emotional bond that fans develop toward players.

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Few of those at Anfield on the final day of last season would have expected Chiesa to be around for the first day of this. His move, it was clear, had not really worked. It is a World Cup season. His reputation remains high in Italy. There has been talk of a move to Napoli, the reigning Serie A champions, or to Atalanta, seeking a replacement for the unsettled Ademola Lookman, places where he might rebuild his career. Even Slot does not seem like a man who was entirely expecting to see him after the summer break. “As long as he is here, he is a Liverpool player,” he said. “I have no reason to believe something will change.” It was hardly a ringing endorsement.

He did not feel qualified to assess why it is that Liverpool’s fans seem to be so enamoured of him; perhaps it was because he was “a big player” in Italy, he wondered, one with a “great history”. Still, he said: “After they sang for him so many times, it is very nice that he has given them something in return.” None of those comments makes it feel absolutely certain that Chiesa will remain beyond the end of the month. And that, in all honesty, is probably the way it has to be.

For all their spending this summer, Liverpool do not have a bottomless pit of money; at some point, managing director Michael Edwards and sporting director Richard Hughes will have to find a way to balance the books. The fans will be willing to sacrifice their semi-ironic love for Chiesa – and the tune he has inspired – if it helps get Alexander Isak over the line.

But not, crucially, without just a little sadness. To be a fan is not just to be invested in the fortunes of a particular team, it is to feel a kinship and a connection and a fondness for the players themselves. How powerful that can be is evident from the outpouring of grief for Jota; it is nothing compared with what his family, present at Anfield on Friday, or his team-mates are enduring, but the emotion of the fans at his loss is still sincere.

Seeing a player move on, of course, is nothing compared with that, but there is a sadness to it, nonetheless, one that football’s obsession with acquisition – so pronounced in this summer of economic excess – tends to overlook. There is something thrilling, exciting, glamorous about the new; it engenders a hope that is pure, uncut, untroubled by the intrusion of reality. But there is something deeper about the old, something that has been allowed to develop and grow, a bond that perhaps, now, we break just a little too easily.

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