Demba Ba's one perfect half-season

The half-season that announced him

Ba arrived at Newcastle United in the summer of 2011 after a collapsed move to Stoke City and a brief, prolific stint at West Ham, where he'd finished as the club's top scorer despite their relegation. At St James' Park he picked up straight where he left off. Two hat-tricks arrived early, against Blackburn Rovers and away at Stoke, and Newcastle rode an 11-game unbeaten start to third in the table. By the time he left for the Africa Cup of Nations in January 2012, Ba had scored 15 league goals, second only to Robin van Persie in the entire division. He was named Premier League Player of the Month for December 2011 and picked in ESPN's Best XI for the first half of the season. His last act before departing for the tournament was scoring in a 3-0 win over Manchester United, Newcastle's first victory over the champions in over a decade.

It was, for that stretch, as complete a run of centre-forward form as the Premier League produced that season, a player who had bounced between France, Belgium and Germany suddenly outscoring everyone bar one of the league's best players.

What happened next

Ba never again led a team's attack the way he had at Newcastle that winter. Within a year he'd moved to Chelsea for an undisclosed fee in January 2013, but there his role shrank to that of a squad option behind more established strikers, and when Diego Costa arrived in the summer of 2014, Chelsea let him go despite Ba wanting to stay. From there his career became a tour of secondary leagues: a title-winning year at Beşiktaş in Turkey, a move to Shanghai Shenhua in China where he won a cup MVP award and later suffered a broken leg, loan spells back and forth between the two countries, and two seasons at İstanbul Başakşehir, where he won a second league title and was involved in a widely reported racism incident involving a match official in a Champions League tie against Paris Saint-Germain. He finished his playing days with a brief stint at Swiss side FC Lugano before retiring in September 2021.

Life after football

Ba didn't disappear from the game. In 2017, alongside Eden Hazard, Yohan Cabaye and Moussa Sow, he co-founded an American lower-league football franchise that eventually became Albion San Diego, and he now serves as the club's chairman, the head of a project he helped build rather than a shirt he wears. It's a long way from the winter of 2011, but it's also, in its own way, a continuation of the same instinct: Ba spent that one season making people believe in him as a striker, and he's spent the years since trying to build something that lasts longer than a hot streak.