When Premier League stalwart Arsenal wanted to announce the richest transfer signing in club history — a fee that could reach €60 million for Lyon striker Alexander Lacazette — its Twitter account posted a 30-second video of a photo shoot, only all of the imagery of its unidentified subject is from the neck down. Along with the clip was the tagline, “You’ll never guess who . . .” with a winking emoji.
A follower immediately replied and guessed Lacazette, prompting Arsenal’s canned response: Arsenal panned to a quick video clip with the man himself appearing in full and saying, “Laca New Signing,” with promotion of #LacaNewSigning at the bottom of the screen. This is 2017, after all, so apparently we all speak in hashtags, memes and video games.
With reports buzzing that Liverpool was acquiring Mohamed Salah from AS Roma, its Twitter account tweet a close-cropped video of a man’s thumb scrolling through tweets favorited by a user with the handle @_AnnounceSalah and the name Announce Salah Now. The messages are a series from fans clamoring for Liverpool to — wait for it — announce the signing of Salah now. The camera soon widens, showing that Salah himself was cruising social media, at which point he says, “Salah, announced!”
It’s no longer enough for Premier League clubs to lavish huge sums on transfers this summer; they must also be extravagant, or at least creative, in heralding their new players.
AS Roma wasn’t only on the business end of the transfer market. The club tweeted a video of a young man playing the FIFA video game and scoring a goal with Roma. The on-screen character in the tweeted-out video-game simulation — it’s pretty meta — turns around to reveal the name Pellegrini on his kit. The camera turns to the man playing FIFA, and sure enough, it’s Lorenzo Pellegrini himself, who then shouts “Forza Roma!”
Aston Villa announced the addition of Chelsea legend John Terry via a fake WhatsApp text chain, in which Villa chairman Tony Xia purportedly tells manager Steve Bruce that Terry had been signed. Xia then adds Terry to the group chat, which includes a host of fake welcomes from current players via texted word or emoji hand sign. It devolves, however, when one player excitedly boasts that Terry is the “best defender we’ve had at this club,” prompting three former star defenders to exit the message string hastily.
An earlier Arsenal offering for a less-expensive player was presented with a quiz asking followers to identify the 10 players the club had added. The list initially appears to have only nine names, until one realizes that the first letters of each name — when read vertically — spell the surname of Sead Kolasinac.
When Crystal Palace was ready to announce its new manager, Frank de Boer, they borrowed some papal imagery and puffed white smoke into the air — out of the chimney at The Original Tasty Jerk around the corner from the club’s stadium.
