Back in the day, you'd usually find out about your team signing a player in the news paper, or in a clinically written press release on the club's website. With the boom of social media, player announcements have become a circus of one-upmanship, with football media teams going to extraordinary lengths to make their new signing videos go viral.
Well, Turkish Süper Lig leaders İstanbul Başakşehirhave pulled out all the stops in their announcement of former Chelsea striker Demba Ba, posting a rather, shall we say, unique clip that appears to reference everything from Francis Coppola's masterpiece 'The Godfather' to Turkish soap operas, before revealing Ba in the distinctive orange shirt posing like an owl.
Ba joins the Istanbul-based side on loan from Chinese Super League outfit Shanghai Shenhua, where he was spent two spells in recent years, interspersed with a sojourn to Göztepe. Before beginning his quest to bounce around the mega-money leagues of the world, Ba enjoyed spells in the Premier League with West Ham United, Newcastle and Chelsea.
His most famous most was arguably his goal against Liverpool in the 2013/14 season, where Steven Gerrard infamously slipped over to allow Ba to run through on goal and seal Chelsea's victory, which in effect ended the Reds' title hopes. The 33-year-old has a solid career scoring record, bagging 186 goals in 365 matches across seven different divisions.
The Italian said that the move to switch the veteran striker's stay from Milan to Chelsea still hadn't been finalised, hinting that his club were still in search of a replacement forward.
