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When EA Sports unveiled Kylian Mbappe as the cover star of EA FC 27 this week, sharp-eyed fans noticed something unexpected tucked into the background of the cover art: a green training pitch with the words "Come to Besiktas" spray-painted across a wall in graffiti style. For casual observers, it looked like a random detail. For anyone versed in football internet culture, it was an immediate punchline.
The phrase has its roots in a 2017 viral marketing moment that became one of football's most enduring jokes. That summer, Turkish Super Lig club Besiktas was signing the Portuguese defender Pepe from Real Madrid, and instead of a conventional announcement, the club staged a phone call between Pepe and his compatriot Ricardo Quaresma, already at the club, in which Quaresma urged his friend to "come to Besiktas."
The video, deliberately rough-looking but carefully orchestrated by the club's communications team, spread across the internet instantly.
The genius of it was in the simplicity. Besiktas head of communications Candas Tolga Isik has recalled how the phrase first emerged organically from fans, who flooded the social media accounts of transfer targets with the comment, sometimes reaching millions of posts on a single player's profile. The club recognized the energy and turned it into a campaign.
The announcement format, featuring a chain of phone calls set to a Euro-trance beat with comic-book-style graphics, was then used to announce a string of signings including Alvaro Negredo, Loic Remy, Gary Medel, and Domagoj Vida.
The phrase quickly outgrew Besiktas itself. Because the club was invoking the names of genuinely elite players, often world-class stars with no realistic chance of ever moving to Istanbul, it took on a second life as absurdist humor.
Fans across the world began posting "Come to Besiktas" under the social media accounts of superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi, and Erling Haaland, essentially as a joke about the gap between football romanticism and transfer market reality. The hashtag #ComeToBesiktas became a fixture of football Twitter and TikTok, a shorthand for wishful thinking taken to its comic extreme.
EA Sports confirmed Mbappe as the EA FC 27 Ultimate Edition cover athlete on July 21, fresh off winning the Golden Boot at the 2026 World Cup with 10 goals, a record haul that also made him the tournament's all-time leading scorer with 22 goals.
The cover image shows him wearing Real Madrid's white kit, arms outstretched, set against a sweeping cityscape. Somewhere in that cityscape, EA's art team embedded the "Come to Besiktas" graffiti, a deliberate nod to the meme.
It is the kind of Easter egg that gaming developers increasingly plant in cover art and in-game environments, rewarding attentive fans with cultural references. In this case, the joke writes itself: the world's biggest football video game, featuring the world's most prominent active footballer, winking at a meme that is fundamentally about football fans dreaming of the impossible.
The image circulating in Turkish football media carries a caption noting that the phrase appeared on EA FC 27's cover art, and the reaction online has been predictably enthusiastic among Besiktas supporters, who have treated it as a kind of unofficial tribute.
Besiktas has long leaned into its reputation as a culturally distinct club, known in part for its notoriously passionate supporter group Carsi, which has been involved in community activism well beyond football.
The "Come to Besiktas" moment fit that identity: irreverent, self-aware, and effective precisely because it did not take itself too seriously.
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