Bradley, Bradley Barcola, Runs down the wing for me – The Barcola Song | OneFootball

It usually takes a while to earn a song at Anfield. Most new signings have to do something first, with more than a few of them coming and going without the Kop ever managing to work out a song for them at all. Bradley Barcola didn’t have to wait, with the travelling Kop having a song ready for the winger on his debut against Ipswich Town in the September of 2026.

That was before he had even so much as kicked a competitive ball for the club, which tells you how much excitement there was about a £123 million arrival from Paris Saint-Germain. The song itself is not new, sung to Buddy Holly’s 1958 record Heartbeat, which Liverpool supporters have used before.

Anyone who watched the Reds in the early 2010s will recognise it instantly, because it was Maxi Rodríguez’s song, with the words having been updated to make it all about the new man:

Duh duh, duh duh duh,

Duh duh, duh duh duh,

Bradley,

Bradley Barcola,

Runs down the wing for me!

Maxi was a popular player without ever being a superstar, so reusing his tune for a nine-figure signing could be seen as laziness from the Kop, if we’re all being honest about it. That being said, it is, as tunes go, dead easy to pick up, which is exactly why it was ringing round the away end so quickly down in Ipswich.

A Missed Trick: Where Was Lola?

Here is where I have to lodge a small complaint, because the supporters missed an open goal. There was a far better song sitting right there, so it’s a real shame that nobody worked on it. I am talking, of course, about Lola by The Kinks.

Think about it for a second. Ray Davies gave the world one of the great singalong hooks in 1970, which scans perfectly. ‘Bar-bar-bar-bar-Barcola’ drops straight into the ‘L-l-l-l-Lola’ pattern without you having to change anything. Even better, the song already does half the work for you, because it spells out ‘C-O-L-A, cola’ in the chorus, so his name literally ending in ‘-cola’ means it would’ve been perfect. In fact, you’d struggle to design a name that fits a famous song more neatly if you tried.

A whole ground bouncing through ‘Bar-bar-bar-bar-Barcola’ to that riff would have been an excellent sight, being the kind of chant that ends up on every highlights reel and gets nicked by other clubs within a month. Instead, we got a perfectly decent tune recycled in a way that kind of cheapens both players. It will do the job, of course, and if the goals flow nobody will care in the slightest. But somewhere out there is a version of this that never happened, so every so often I will think about it and sigh.