There are songs that get bound up with one particular season, so that hearing them again drops you straight back into it. The Sadio Mané song is one of those. Sing it now and it is impossible not to think of the spring of 2019, the run to Madrid, and one of the best Liverpool sides most of us have ever seen. The words even said as much. The most-loved version of Mané’s chant is a short, simple one, and it earned its place in the Kop Choir’s repertoire during the 2018-19 Champions League run.
It goes like this, sung to the tune of Voulez-Vous by ABBA:
Sadio
Mané! Runnin’ down the wing,
Mané!
Hear the Kopites sing,
Mané!
And we’re Going to Madrid!
That last line is what gives it away. It tied the song to a specific target, the 2019 final in Madrid, and when the Reds duly got there and won it, the chant became a little piece of that whole adventure. The supporters carried on singing it after that, just altering the final line to ‘And we won it in Madrid’.
Everything the Crowd Wanted
Mané made the song easy to sing because he gave the crowd so much to shout about. He signed from Southampton in 2016 and became a key part of the best years Liverpool had enjoyed in a generation. The Champions League in 2019, the Premier League title in 2020 that ended the thirty-year wait, a share of the Premier League Golden Boot; He was quick, direct and relentless, and he saved some of his biggest goals for the biggest occasions. Off the pitch, he had a reputation for humility and for the charitable work he did back home in Senegal.
When he left for Bayern Munich in 2022, there was none of the awkwardness that sometimes surrounds a big departure. He had just helped win two domestic cups and reach another European final coming closer to winning the quadruple than any side, ever. Hee had also lifted the Africa Cup of Nations trophy with Senegal a few months earlier, with the general feeling being that he had earned the right to a new challenge with nothing but goodwill behind him. You do not hear many Liverpool fans say a bad word about Sadio Mané, and that is rarer than it sounds.
The song has faded a little now he has gone, as these things do. But bring it back out and it still works, partly because it is such an easy one to sing and partly because of everything it reminds you of. For a golden few years, Mané really was running down that wing and the Kopites really were singing. It only comes out on special occasions, usually when the Kop is running through the repertoire of songs of former players that everyone still has a soft spot for, but it works because it’s such a banger.
