Stormzy and laundry ladies: the new face of transfer announcements

Paul Pogba’s arrival at Manchester United was announced via unconventional means – and times have changed since signings were paraded on the pitch

Pogba: I am back home at Manchester United and here to win titles.

Nick Ames

@NickAmes82

The formula used to be simple enough, the number of stock tableaux perhaps two. Your club’s new signing would be announced, once upon a time in the morning’s newspaper and latterly via its website or Twitter account, and accompanied by some standard images. One would conveniently capture the fresh arrival – pen in hand, beaming manager to one side and oak panels providing the backdrop – in the throes of signing his name in ink. Then all parties would decamp downstairs to the pitch, a scarf would be held aloft and the virtues of an institution loved since childhood would be dutifully extolled.

Those were simpler times; these days you never quite know how a big deal will drop and Paul Pogba’s arrival at Manchester United underlined the point. Perhaps it would have been a letdown if such a long-running saga had finished conventionally; fortunately the rapper Stormzy was at hand on Monday night to confirm what we already knew.

A video – produced by Adidas, which was never going to be far from the scene – appeared on the musician’s Facebook page showing Stormzy and Pogba dancing alongside each other, the former wearing a United shirt with “Pogba” on its back. It was swiftly removed – generally a pointless move given the alacrity with which social media gaffes are captured for posterity – but the transfer was confirmed via official channels hours later and the video, which Adidas subsequently tweeted, now takes pride of place on the club’s website.

An exclusive for Stormzy, then? Not quite – it turned out he had been scooped by Manchester United’s laundry team in what at least constituted a nod, however inadvertent, to the sport’s old earthiness. A tweet posted at teatime showed Pogba reunited with the ladies who used to clean his kit, with a background of washing machines rather than boardroom finery. At the time it confirmed nothing – being in town for a medical hardly precluded a visit to see old colleagues – but it suggested a deal was effectively done.

The deal’s official announcement, at 12.20am on Tuesday, was accompanied by the hashtag “#POGBACK” and presumably timed to coincide with day breaking in the Asian markets in which United set great stock.

As this proves, early leaks are not always harmful. This one, of course, will have birthed a rush of extra Twitter mentions and “buzz” without detracting from any hysteria surrounding the formal reveal and things like this rarely escape the marketing heads. It is a curiosity, though, that United’s two biggest-name transfers of this summer have been announced by other parties. Zlatan Ibrahimovic confirmed his own move to Old Trafford on Instagram and there is certainly a sense that the increasingly complicated demands of sponsors and social media hold more and more sway over both the timing and – ever more elaborate – choreography of unveilings.

Would any of this have happened under Sir Alex Ferguson’s watch? The instinct is to say no, the natural urge to recall big-name arrivals such as that of Jaap Stam, when in a rather more traditional Manchester welcome the defender stood under an umbrella – held aloft by his new manager – by the side of the pitch as their images were captured. Ferguson, for whom control was an addiction, would surely have been incandescent at such seemingly haphazard management of information and is unlikely to have sanctioned the level of extra-curricular activity in which his new player engaged to celebrate the transfer.

Would today’s football club chiefs stand for as low-key an arrival as that of Jaap Stam? Photograph: Daily Mail/Rex/Shutterstock

Yet it is a difficult comparison to make. The package around football has moved at a staggering pace even since Ferguson’s retirement three years ago; the sport itself increasingly feels a supplement to the money-driven pageantry around it, fuelled by channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Weibo, and it is more likely that Ferguson would have had to make compromises – much as a number of older-school managers have had to when faced with clubs’ commercial imperatives, particularly in pre-season.

For a more conventional breach of protocol that Ferguson would never have countenanced, perhaps it is more apposite to look across Manchester. After John Stones’ switch to Manchester City from Everton was revealed inadvertently via Uefa’s publishing of City’s Champions League squad, a grime artist’s prematurely released rap feels like the least of anyone’s problems.