As you may have noticed, Burnley have carved themselves a niche as the unlikely darlings of the transfer reveal video after amassing a vast repertoire of entertaining clips to welcome new faces to Turf Moor in recent months.
In fact, the Premier League club’s back catalogue now covers several years after their first mainstream hit: an amusing video to announce the arrival of Peter Crouch in February 2019.
Since then, the Clarets’ ever-creative media department have spent every summer and winter transfer window drumming up an endless array of wacky sketches in order to reveal the club’s latest transfers using Hollywood movies, professional wrestling, “The Simpsons,” assorted game shows and even the “Teletubbies.”
Even by their own high standards, Burnley outdid themselves last week while unveiling the signing of Aaron Ramsey (not that one) from Aston Villa with a “Barbie”-themed video that featured Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
Seamlessly embedded within a clip from the new Greta Gerwig movie, the England youth international popped up to say “Hi Burnley … I mean Barbie … up the Clarets!”
Just days before, Belgium international defender Hannes Delcroix was deployed as Harry the Hunter (aka the “shrunken head guy”) from “Beetlejuice” to rubber stamp his transfer to Turf Moor.
This was after French winger Wilson Odobert arrived from Troyes, pending the approval of Pam from “The Office.”
The Clarets also enjoyed viral success in July when they rolled out a bizarre 50-second “Teletubbies” video to welcome Swiss international Zeki Amdouni to the club.
The clip began with a loudspeaker asking “Who are Burnley signing today?” only for an image of Amdouni to appear on the screen embedded in Tinky Winky’s tummy. The 22-year-old forward then waved “Eh-oh” to the “Teletubbies,” who all waved back.
With some of the oddest transfer unveiling videos on record, the “Barbie” and “Teletubbies” clips are just the latest additions to Burnley’s weird and wonderful collection.
Crouch was welcomed aboard with a robot video, referencing to the striker’s trademark goal celebration…
“Jurassic Park” was used as inspiration to flag the arrival of Brontosaurus-like Dutch striker Wout Weghorst in January 2022…
The second wave of Burnley reveals then kicked off in July 2022 with a WWE-themed video to announce the arrival of Samuel Bastien from Standard Liege…
The overwhelming popularity of the wrestling video forced Burnley to rethink the manner in which they prepared their transfer reveals as the club started to stockpile potential clips and ideas for future use.
“WWE blew it all up and we set a bit of a bar so we do plan them [now],” Burnley social media manager Rebecca Stubbs said. “We have a few in the pipeline to use for whoever.”
The pipeline was put under immediate stress as Burnley began their summer recruitment by bringing in two players from Manchester City on the first day of July last year — the first being CJ Egan-Riley and the second being Taylor Harwood-Bellis, whose loan deal was accompanied by a “Stranger Things” video that saw the youngster’s initials spelled out by blinking lights.
Republic of Ireland international Josh Cullen then followed with a slightly daft video that saw the midfielder emerge from 10 Downing Street as Larry the Cat, the British prime minister’s famous feline house guest, watched on.
