AS Roma announce new signings with photos of missing children

Italian football club AS Roma are known for their viral transfer announcements but the club is now using their reach online to raise awareness of missing children.

The side has joined forces with the charities National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States and Telefono Azzurro in Italy.

Every summer signing announcement on Twitter will be accompanied by a social media video, which will include the details and a photo of a missing child in the hope of helping to find them.

The club is also in talks with a British charity in order to do the same in England.

The idea is drawn from Soul Asylum’s ‘Runaway Train’ video, which highlighted similar cases and went on to help find 21 children.

“With Roma, we thought, we could try and do something similar but updated for the social media generation, which didn’t exist when Soul Asylum released their video," said AS Roma's head of strategy Paul Rogers.

"We want to use the viral nature of social media transfer announcements to help raise awareness for missing children.

"We have a massive social media following and our announcements generate incredible reach and awareness, all over the world, so we thought that at the exact moment when the world’s attention is on the club’s announcement, we could use our social media channels not for self-promotion but rather to help both the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Telefono Azzurro find missing children.”