Demba Ba: one unforgettable Newcastle season, and after

A striker on fire

Demba Ba arrived at Newcastle United in the summer of 2011 after a strange, bruising few months, a move to Stoke City had collapsed over a failed medical, and his exit from Hoffenheim had been bitter. None of that mattered once the season started. He scored two hat-tricks before Christmas, including one at Stoke that took his tally to eight goals and kept Newcastle unbeaten and third in the table after eleven games.

By December, Ba was Premier League Player of the Month. ESPN named him in their Best XI for the first half of the season. He scored the opener as Newcastle beat Manchester United 3–0, their first win over the champions in over a decade, and left for the Africa Cup of Nations in January 2012 with 15 league goals, second in the race for the Golden Boot behind only Van Persie. For a club that had been promoted back to the top flight only a year earlier, it was a remarkable run from a forward nobody outside Germany had really known two years before.

What happened next

Ba never again produced a single season quite like that one at Newcastle. He stayed into the following campaign, but by January 2013 he had moved on to Chelsea for an undisclosed fee. There he had moments, a late winner against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League quarter-final among them, but he was never a guaranteed starter, and when Diego Costa arrived at Stamford Bridge in the summer of 2014, Chelsea let Ba go in search of regular football elsewhere.

From there his career became a tour of leagues rather than a continuation of that Newcastle peak: a title and a flurry of European goals at Beşiktaş, a move to Shanghai Shenhua in China that included a serious leg break in 2016, loan spells and a free transfer back and forth between Turkey and China, and finally two seasons at İstanbul Başakşehir, where he won a second Turkish league title in 2019–20. He finished his playing days with a short, unglamorous spell at FC Lugano in Switzerland, retiring in September 2021 at 36.

The afterlife

Ba's post-playing life has taken him into ownership rather than coaching. In 2017, alongside Eden Hazard, Yohan Cabaye and Moussa Sow, he co-founded an expansion franchise, San Diego 1904 FC, in the North American Soccer League. After a 2021 merger with Albion San Diego, Ba became head owner of the combined club, a long way, in every sense, from the autumn afternoons in Newcastle when he was, briefly, one of the most feared strikers in England.