Fabrizio Romano is considered a guru among transfer experts

Friday is deadline day in European football – the transfer window closes in the major leagues. Figures like Fabrizio Romano are in high demand then: transfer experts who breathlessly spread the hottest rumors and transfers on social media. Romano, 31, manages this niche perfectly. He has been the first to announce countless transfers, as well as coach dismissals – he always does so with the rather original phrase “Here we go”, which has now become part of pop culture.

Romano has been in the business for a long time; his career began in Milan, where he would visit restaurants and hotels in the hope that an agent or player would pass on information to him. He often succeeded – the football business is a fairground of vanities; indiscretions and deliberate disinformation are a fixed part of it. This is especially true in Italy, the country of the legendary “Gazzetta dello Sport”, the pink bible in which the wide world of football is discussed on around thirty pages every day.

Romano’s beginnings tell of days long gone, when sleazy players’ agents in ill-fitting suits finalized their deals in run-down motorway service stations. Today, he no longer has to leave his own four walls to land the big scoops – he says he spends up to 15 hours a day on the phone and on messaging apps.

What has remained the same is that there are plenty of shady agents who say: spread the word that this and that club from a major league is interested in my client. In return, I’ll give you this first look. It’s been like this for decades, ever since football transfers became a global billion-dollar business. The hunger for news is gigantic – Romano skillfully serves it with up to a hundred social media posts a day.

For the German magazine “11 Freunde”, Romano is a “shaggy shadow plant”

He also seems to have a certain sense of humor; at least that’s what the sentences he dictated to the New York Times suggest. He said that he initially used Instagram as a private vehicle, posting sunsets and his dinner. But then he had to realize: “Nobody was interested in my life. Everyone was asking about transfers. I’m not a star. I’m a journalist, and a journalist is a mediator.”

Not even Ariella Kaeslin, the agile former top gymnast, could have pulled off such a mental contortion. Romano and all the other so-called transfer experts and insiders are so shameless in their self-promotion that even Dieter Bohlen would say: Maybe a little more restraint is a good idea. At least as important as an exclusive report is holding your own face in front of a camera.

Romano has a number of partners who have made him a wealthy man: from beer brands to, of course, betting companies. He sometimes gets paid for his tweets; last year, FC Luzern paid him 135 francs so that Romano could announce a sponsorship deal with a local brewery. EA Sports has just integrated him into the new version of “EA FC”, the successor to the unprecedentedly successful “Fifa” series. The excellent German football magazine “11 Freunde” describes the Italian in its latest issue as a “shaggy shadowy plant”. But you can hardly hold all of this against him – why not earn money in a business where almost everything revolves around money anyway?

The phenomenon is not a European one. In the USA, men like Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania (both NBA) or Adam Schefter (NFL) are paid millions to tweet transfers a few seconds before the official announcement. They too have become stars, brands. That is not the only thing that connects them with Romano: it is hardly an insult to describe them as glorified PR agents, almost claqueurs.

Critical opinions, analyses and classifications are in vain in their work – one could upset a source or a financier. Romano recently came to the aid of the controversial English footballer Mason Greenwood, who is advised by an Italian who in turn has good relations with Romano. That’s how it goes.

The result is sometimes grotesque wording: Interchangeable supplementary players are hailed as the potential next superstar when contracts are extended – it is, it seems, the condition for the scoop.

A few years ago, the US media outlet “The New Republic” detailed the working methods of basketball insider Wojnarowski, who receives an annual salary of $7 million from ESPN. It is worth reading. Schefter is known to keep a list of over 150 people to whom he regularly sends presents. He is said to spend $16,000 a year on chocolate alone. Small gifts maintain friendships. And the flow of information.

Wojnarowski, Romano and co. are so successful and popular that it is understandable why they prefer to hammer out concise exclusives at a high cadence rather than providing in-depth reporting. Even if, as in Romano’s case a few weeks ago, it is only that a Scandinavian bookmaker will be adorning the Inter Milan jersey from this season. This received almost 20,000 likes on Facebook alone.

What does this have to do with serious journalism?

The scam works brilliantly and clearly meets the needs of a wide range of consumers. In 2022, Romano was named “Football Journalist of the Year” at the “Globe Soccer Awards” in Dubai, which fits the picture quite well: In the perception of donors from the United Arab Emirates, a nation that “Reporters Without Borders” ranks 160th out of 180 in terms of press freedom, Romano’s harmless hype reporting is certainly impeccable. But how much does it have to do with serious journalism?

The signal effect of the everything-is-great groove of this kind of favor journalism on the clubs, which are increasingly isolating themselves, should not be underestimated. They seem to misunderstand the role of the media: independent journalists are not there to give an unfiltered account of the club’s view, they are not the record keepers of the club’s bodies, whose job it is to boost ticket sales with enthusiasm over mediocre purchases. A few weeks ago, FC Basel showed that it did not understand this when it tried to bully a journalist for her critical reporting with a boycott.

That would never happen to Romano. Keep that in mind when half the world is hungry for his tweets on Friday.