There's no meeting, no committee, no vote. A new signing gets a chant the same way a nickname sticks in a school yard — somebody tries it out loud enough, often enough, and eventually nobody remembers a time before it existed.
We've covered before what makes any chant catch on — the short version being a familiar tune, a short lyric, and something the crowd already feels. Player chants follow those same rules, but with one extra constraint that makes them genuinely harder to write: they have to work with a specific name, and names are stubborn things. A syllable count that doesn't sit right, a surname that clashes with the rhythm of the tune underneath it, and the whole thing falls apart no matter how good the player is.
This trips people up every transfer window. A player can be a genuine hit on the pitch and simply never get a proper terrace song, purely because their name doesn't fit anything already in circulation. Short, punchy, one or two-syllable surnames tend to slot into existing tunes far more easily than long or awkward ones — which means chant-worthiness has almost nothing to do with ability and a lot to do with phonetics, whether anyone admits that out loud or not.
Nobody sits down and decides a player deserves a chant. The name either fits a tune, or it doesn't, and the crowd finds out fast.
The overwhelming majority of player chants are new lyrics dropped onto a tune that's already been used for a different player, sometimes for several. That's not laziness — it's efficiency. Reusing a proven, crowd-recognizable tune means a new chant can spread in a single home game instead of needing weeks to catch on, because nobody has to learn a new melody, just new words over one they already know instinctively.
A new signing having a strong debut match is often the actual trigger point for a chant to appear, even if someone in the crowd had the words ready weeks earlier. Chants tend to get their first real airing in a moment of genuine excitement — a good tackle, a goal, a full debut — rather than being unveiled cold. If the first attempt lands during a flat, low-energy match, it's much more likely to disappear, even with a perfectly good tune and name behind it.
Every transfer window adds new candidates and quietly retires old ones as players move on. It's one of the reasons we started actually cataloguing chants in the first place — a songbook that's constantly being written and rewritten by 50,000 people at once isn't going to hold still long enough for anyone to document casually. If you want to see which chants from recent seasons have actually stuck versus which ones faded, our full songbook breaks it down.