On a Monday morning in February this year, Kilmarnock’s internal media team were up against the clock.
Aaron Tshibola, a journeyman returning for his fourth stint at Rugby Park, was due to arrive around 8:30 in the morning and meet his teammates at 9:30. That left multimedia executive Scott Symington and social media executive Blair Gormal with a brief window to get everything done before publicly announcing Tshibola’s signing at 10am. Once upon a time in Scottish football, “everything” would have meant an interview and the obligatory scarf-over-the-head shot taken at pitchside. But times have changed, and Symington and Gormal were determined to get Tshibola to do something he’s almost definitely never done at any of the other 12 professional clubs he’s played for: Act.
“It was a very tight turnaround, it was very much a case of: ‘How you doing, nice to meet you, sit there, camera here, say this,’” recalls Symington. “And in like a minute it was done.”
Acting opposite Killie’s new No. 36, thanks to the wonders of modern editing, was Keegan-Michael Key from the American sketch show Key & Peele, and the announcement video the club subsequently released – a gloriously silly recreation of a sketch about an uptight high-school teacher who can’t pronounce the name Aaron – went down a storm: viewed over 100,000 times on X and showered with all the usual praise about giving the admin a raise and winning the internet for today. The otherwise humdrum occurrence of a team sat 11th in the league signing a 31-year-old defensive midfielder on a free had somehow been transformed, however briefly, into a social media event.
“To get it all done and out for 10 o’clock, that was some effort, but ones like that are probably the most fun,” says Gormal.
This is a preview of Scott Fleming’s full article, published in Issue 40 of Nutmeg.
If you’re not a subscriber you can order your copy now, or take out a Print or combined Print + Digital subscription. This will give you full access to downloads of Nutmeg’s entire print back catalogue as well as our digital platform Nutmeg FC.