On 13/08/2026 at 07:00, AJMurphy said:

Gone really quiet on the exits.

I'm starting to worry....

Will be a last minute frenzy fire sale

2 hours ago, PhilH930 said:

Will be a last minute frenzy fire sale

More likely loans than sales.

"
Posted 4 hours ago

Fabrizio Romano is the biggest name in the transfer news game Credit: INSTAGRAM@FABRIZIOROMANO

 

The emphatic recent assertion that a high-profile Premier League player will definitely leave his club this summer came from Fabrizio Romano, the self-styled king of the football transfer story, so the information was baked into a global narrative before anyone could say it was untrue. Least of all, the player’s own representatives.

 

When they did message Romano to say that this was false information – there had categorically, as yet, been no discussions between player and current club – his cheery reply demonstrated that, despite amassing more than 100 million social media followers, he is not a slave to the time-honoured journalistic method of checking his information with both sides.

 

The club had furnished him with the information about the player, he said, so he was going with that. If the player leaves, Romano will be able to claim the story – written on the balance of probability – as correct all along. If he does not, it will barely be remembered. Just one of thousands of transfer market posts this summer from a Milan-born 33-year-old who gives the impression of barely sleeping during the window.

 

Romano’s remarkable social media output, swarming over and pulverising transfer stories in a way which means few ever remember when they were broken by somebody else, or that he got some wrong, has built him a collective 77.2 million followers across Instagram and X, with another 3.2 million YouTube subscribers and 26.7 million disciples on TikTok.

 

A captive audience which some of the younger generation of football agents – and even some staff at clubs – see as a PR platform for themselves and their business. One senior member of the press team staff at a top Premier League club asked Romano to record a message featuring his ‘Here We Go’ catchphrase (denoting a concluded deal) for the birthday of one of his children.

 

But amid negotiations of the deal which eventually saw Yan Diomande sign for Real Madrid from RB Leipzig this week, Romano was called out and did not like it.

 

German broadcaster and transfer market journalist Florian Plettenberg criticised him for declaring the Diomande move a ‘Here We Go’ – Romano’s ubiquitous catchphrase has now become a noun – when there were contractual issues still to resolve. A firm possibility was being tweeted as certainty – disingenuously, claimed Plettenberg – to give the sense that Romano was ahead of the pack in breaking news of a transfer.

 

Plettenberg wasn’t the only one suggesting that. Privately, Diomande’s agents said the deal had not been done, terms had not been agreed, and that Romano had gone too early.

 

But Romano’s response was vindictive. A deeply personal attack on Plettenberg included the revelation of private messages in which the German had asked Romano for advice on increasing his own social media following and lavished him with praise. Romano even revealed how Plettenberg had told him: ‘Your work is my motivation.’

 

Plettenberg pointed to a Romano ‘done deal’ that never was – Marc Guehi from Crystal Palace to Liverpool – and said the Italian deleted his dud stories. There is only ever one winner on social media when you’re competing with someone who has millions of followers. Plettenberg was on the receiving end of a pile-on. But the German seemed to have hit a nerve. In a post around that time, Romano made a point of telling his followers that he did speak to more than one party.

‘You used to be a role model for many, for me. Unfortunately, you’re not anymore. You don’t know everything.’

Florian Plettenberg to Romano on X

You can take your pick of delicate negotiations declared done by Romano which are so far from conclusion that he cannot possibly have consulted all parties to undertake a journalistic job on it.

 

He called the conclusion of Ibrahima Konate’s new Liverpool deal earlier this summer, a few weeks before the player left for Real Madrid, with no Anfield deal signed. There was Joao Pedro’s ‘move’ to Newcastle, stated as fact a few weeks before he instead signed for Brighton. Florian Wirtz’s move from Bayer Leverkusen to Liverpool last summer was ten days from being finalised when Romano declared that one concluded: more guesswork.

 

The eight-minute YouTube video in which an excitable Romano discussed the concluded Diomande to Real Madrid deal included no mention of how, just two months earlier, he’d been just as animated about Bayern Munich’s Michael Olise being ‘the name of the secret star’ wanted by Real Madrid. ‘This dream signing, a bomba, a €150 million club record.’ Real issued a statement declaring no interest in Olise, who remains a Bayern player.

 

Romano’s profile and following has certainly built him contacts among the biggest movers and shakers in football who see him as beneficial to them and feed him stories. He is well connected with Jorge Mendes, with the inheritors of Mino Raiola’s agency and with Ali Rabat of the Epic agency, who handles so much Chelsea business that he is a de facto sixth sporting director at the club.

 

The fact that some of his agent contacts enjoy him posting photographs of themselves with their player on the jet flying him to a new club is a sign of how agenting has changed. Clubs used to consider it taboo for agents to promote themselves. These images have become a key tool for Romano, who tweets some of them with a @fabrizioromano watermark and presents them as ‘exclusive’. The fingerprints of Romano’s sources of information are provided by the private jet images, because those he talks to are generally in the frame, getting the exposure.

 

This is all part of an extraordinary output of 100 or more posts a day across all platforms, pushed out by Romano and his staff, conjuring the impression of him being at the centre of a whirlwind of seeming continuous transfer activity.

 

On his YouTube videos, he exudes vast self-confidence, taking his follower ‘family’ on what he presents as a journey into the market. ‘We jump into it together’. He uses rudimentary AI tools to curate a mental picture of a deal yet to be done, with images of players in the shirt of the club supposedly seeking them. A picture of Bruno Guimaraes running out at the Emirates Stadium, with a delighted Mikel Arteta looking on, was being tweeted days before the Brazilian signed. It’s relentless. The world of transfers and social media is a brutal one but no one else is doing it to this level.

 

‘Every single day there are updates. Every single minute. Every single second,’ Romano told his followers in one recent YouTube video. Another part of the strategy is to repeatedly issue posts on the same transfer, building a sense of constant movement while each ‘update’ adds nothing at all. Romano tweeted about Ronald Araujo’s loan move from Barcelona to Liverpool 13 times between first reporting the story and the transfer announcement.

Romano’s bumper social media following

Such is the hunger for transfer gossip online, Romano’s combined following on X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok (140.3 million) surpasses that of both Arsenal and Spurs.

 

Of course, the market does not work like this. Negotiations often grind on slowly and there are days at this time in the cycle when nothing significant happens. But for the many who crave a constant feed of transfer talk, any link between club and player will suffice, however thin. So will the endless tweets, creating the sense of a development and a saga when there is none. Stories and hard facts are a side-show to the social media whirl.

 

Staff at some clubs will not take Romano’s calls because of their frustration with a modus operandi in which, as they see it, he either jeopardises delicately poised transfer negotiations by claiming to be ahead of them or builds momentum by using his social media presence to help make a deal possible. Some in the game view him as a nuisance influencer, rather than a reporter.

 

Some agents feel the same. One was in the delicate process of getting the best deal for a British player who was reluctantly leaving the Premier League for a European club, only to find that a source linked to the selling club was feeding information to Romano about possible flight times for the private jet which would take that player away.

 

Managers such as Sir Alex Ferguson would certainly have had words to say about self-promotion like this and Peter Robinson, the legendary Liverpool chief executive who operated through stealth, would be spinning in his grave.

 

There is still the old paranoia in the agents’ world about a rival jumping on information about a deal, gatecrashing it and denying them their lucrative cut. But there are now many more individuals in the loop – from junior agency staff to big club recruitment teams – and some are dazzled by that big social media following.

 

Southampton, whose reasons for jealously guarding transfer information include wanting to produce excellent social media reveals of new signings for their fans, playfully trolled Romano after signing Mads Roerslev from Brentford, with a graphic stating his age, Premier League and career appearances and ‘Fabrizio Tweets: 0’.

 

Romano then tweeted news of Finn Azaz’s arrival as a ‘new striker’ from Middlesbrough, denying Saints the surprise factor of the video they were preparing. ‘Fab’s back, then’ the club tweeted, with a rolling eyes emoji, in response to Romano’s tweet about Azaz, who is actually an attacking midfielder.

Staff at some clubs will not take Romano’s calls because of their frustration with his modus operandi... they view him as a nuisance influencer, rather than a reporter.

In a sign that many followers of the game are tiring of his hyperbole and perceived sleight of hand, the major Reddit group ‘r/soccer’, a community of 8.8 million, has sought to restrict Romano content in their threads to exclusives only, to ‘limit his exposure and platforming’. The community’s administrators told members: ‘Romano has increasingly been accused (with validity) of siphoning off other journalists’ content and passing off as his own.’

 

It cited an ‘excessive spam aspect’ in which the content ‘increasingly moves away from important exclusives, and towards the drip-feeding of non-updates on transfer sagas that offer little original value, and instead amount to spam and the drowning out of other transfer stories that are less click-baity’. It cited what it called ‘the shill aspect’, and Romano’s ‘close associations with many clubs and agents’. Members of r/soccer were told that ‘several club subreddits’ had banned all posts about Romano. Chelsea’s has. R/soccer has since banned Romano content altogether.

 

Atletico Madrid were so incensed by Romano promoting a narrative about Julian Alvarez wanting to leave them for Barcelona that they published mocking posts depicting three Barcelona players, Lamine Yamal, Raphinha, and Pedri, wearing Atletico’s jersey with his deal-done catchphrase ‘Here We Go’ and accusing him of participating in a Barca ‘machine’ of ‘convenient leaks, fake news, constant disrespect’.

 

It was a funny, successful riposte, and proof that it is far easier for a club to challenge Romano than members of the journalistic community. When a British journalist accused him of artificially fuelling that Alvarez to Barca story in early July, in an attempt to make it happen for the Catalan club, Romano’s response was again highly personalised and spiteful.

 

He tweeted about some of the journalist’s transfer market stances from the previous summer which in the fulness of time had not come to pass. The reporter countered by republishing Romano’s 2022 tweet declaring ‘Joao Pedro to Newcastle – done deal’ and he was on intellectually far stronger ground. But, as in the Plettenberg case, it was the reporter who faced a pile-on.

 

In an information sphere where immediacy wins over editorial judgment, the merest suggestion of a deal feeds an enormous feedback loop in which headlines create market interest and market interest strengthens negotiating positions, which strengthen the suggestion floated in the first place.

 

But it was when Romano published a single source’s information as fact in the real world beyond transfer talk that the dangers of taking a chance and neglecting to do old-school checking were exposed in a most excruciating and devastating way.

 

After news surfaced that the former Chelsea, Newcastle and Everton player Christian Atsu was reported missing in an earthquake which hit Turkey in February 2023, Romano posted that the 31-year-old was alive.

 

He wrote: ‘He (Atsu) has now been rescued from the rubble and transported to hospital after suffering injuries to his right foot and suffering from breathing difficulties. Stay strong, Chris’. Atsu was in fact dead. His body was recovered several days later.

 

Romano does not appear to have ever apologised for that error, which an excellent study of his work by investigative journalist Nick Harris for his Sporting Intelligence website earlier this year found had caused distress to Atsu’s family.

 

The Milan-born Romano has received flattering write-ups in Columbia Journalism Review and L’Equipe. In the latter, last year, he said he employed two people to help him with ‘graphic design’ and another on ‘video editing’ but that he managed the ‘strictly editorial’ side himself. His exact income is unclear but an influencer platform called ‘Hafi’, the authority of which is unclear, suggested last year that he had earned around £300,000 in the January transfer window and was netting £3.9 million a year.

 

In the L’Equipe interview, he described his big football break, when an employee working in Barcelona’s La Masia academy asked him if he would write about two unknown players he had befriended, Mauro Icardi and Gerard Deulofeu, once of Everton. Romano obliged and when that contact, an Italian, started working with Icardi’s agent, he was given the exclusives on his moves to Sampdoria and Inter Milan. He was eventually recruited by Italy’s Sky Sport and displayed a self-assurance which made him a competitor to top dog Gianluca Di Marzio.

 

The helpful pieces about Icardi, written for a friend, revealed in microcosm how Romano would go on to build a transfer market empire on social media. His success has been built upon proximity to a network of agents, intermediaries and sporting directorate staff, all motivated by what access to his audience can bring them. ‘He is a vehicle for agent and club briefing. He forgoes any fact checking,’ says one source who has worked inside British football at an elite level.

 

Another who is sceptical about the way Romano works as an aide to contacts asks: ‘When information originates with people seeking to move a player, influence negotiations or shape public perception, where does reporting end and amplification begin?’

 

The question of precisely who Romano is willing to act as a vehicle for was thrown into the spotlight earlier this year when he broadcast a paid video clip, two minutes, 14 seconds in length and labelled as advertising, in which he endorsed what he called the ‘global humanitarian role’ of Saudi Arabia.

 

That is the same regime whose ruler, Mohammed bin Salman sanctioned the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was seized, murdered and dismembered with a bone saw.

 

This seemed like a serious misstep. L’Equipe called him into question. X even added a contextual note to Romano’s Saudi post, linking to various Amnesty International articles highlighting the kingdom’s lack of concrete progress on human rights.

 

Romano has been unwilling to discuss whether the Saudis were paying him, and if so, how much. But bigging up Saudi ‘human rights’ seemed to open doors.

 

The advertisement coincided with one of Romano’s trips to Saudi Arabia, where he was conveniently pitch-side when Cristiano Ronaldo warmed up before a game for Al Nassr against Al Hazem.

 

Ronaldo wandered over to shake his hand, in a scene carefully filmed and broadcast on Romano’s social networks and currently pinned to the top of his Instagram feed. It has been viewed millions of times on that platform alone. Romano also broke the news that Ronaldo would not be leaving his Saudi club.

 

Since Romano’s content is free, he has needed partner sponsors for income, including an online betting site, an AI content builder, a cryptocurrency builder, a cryptocurrency exchange and FIFA. McDonald’s and Panini joined a big roster of partners for his 2026 World Cup output.

 

The Sporting Intelligence investigation reported that an intermediary company claiming ties to Romano had contacted Norwegian clubs offering them paid promotion through Romano’s platforms in 2022.

 

The allegations, which first surfaced in Danish paper Tipsbladet, quoted a former director of the Norwegian club Valerenga, who said he had received emails offering a single Fabrizio Romano promotional social media post for 11,600 Norwegian kroner (£900) and a promotional video for 63,070 kroner (£4,900).

 

Analysis by the Norwegian media outlet Idrettspolitikk claimed that company purporting to act on behalf of Romano had been offering clubs a direct line to him. ‘You can submit the request directly to Fabrizio Romano here,’ one of the emails stated.

 

Romano has not responded to questions about that. We asked him to discuss with us his methods and the question marks which have been raised about him. As of last night, he had not responded. But on Tuesday, he gave a distinct sense that he feels his race is run in the transfer market information business.

 

Romano declared on LinkedIn that he was ‘probably not gonna continue into the transfer market industry as I’m doing right now for longer (sic). It’s time to change the approach, the view… but this will be another topic soon.’ True to form, he presented this as a ‘Here We Go’.

 

There were two million shares on that single post alone, though one of the 46,000 comments spoke for many who started following him before his output became an industry:

‘If you moved back to just announcing “Here We Go” when the deal is done, the joy and surprise of the transfer market may come back. For most, it just feels painful now

Hopefully people stop quoting this c**t as some kind of guarantee now...

29 minutes ago, dkw said:

"
Posted 4 hours ago

Fabrizio Romano is the biggest name in the transfer news game Credit: INSTAGRAM@FABRIZIOROMANO

 

The emphatic recent assertion that a high-profile Premier League player will definitely leave his club this summer came from Fabrizio Romano, the self-styled king of the football transfer story, so the information was baked into a global narrative before anyone could say it was untrue. Least of all, the player’s own representatives.

 

When they did message Romano to say that this was false information – there had categorically, as yet, been no discussions between player and current club – his cheery reply demonstrated that, despite amassing more than 100 million social media followers, he is not a slave to the time-honoured journalistic method of checking his information with both sides.

 

The club had furnished him with the information about the player, he said, so he was going with that. If the player leaves, Romano will be able to claim the story – written on the balance of probability – as correct all along. If he does not, it will barely be remembered. Just one of thousands of transfer market posts this summer from a Milan-born 33-year-old who gives the impression of barely sleeping during the window.

 

Romano’s remarkable social media output, swarming over and pulverising transfer stories in a way which means few ever remember when they were broken by somebody else, or that he got some wrong, has built him a collective 77.2 million followers across Instagram and X, with another 3.2 million YouTube subscribers and 26.7 million disciples on TikTok.

 

A captive audience which some of the younger generation of football agents – and even some staff at clubs – see as a PR platform for themselves and their business. One senior member of the press team staff at a top Premier League club asked Romano to record a message featuring his ‘Here We Go’ catchphrase (denoting a concluded deal) for the birthday of one of his children.

 

But amid negotiations of the deal which eventually saw Yan Diomande sign for Real Madrid from RB Leipzig this week, Romano was called out and did not like it.

 

German broadcaster and transfer market journalist Florian Plettenberg criticised him for declaring the Diomande move a ‘Here We Go’ – Romano’s ubiquitous catchphrase has now become a noun – when there were contractual issues still to resolve. A firm possibility was being tweeted as certainty – disingenuously, claimed Plettenberg – to give the sense that Romano was ahead of the pack in breaking news of a transfer.

 

Plettenberg wasn’t the only one suggesting that. Privately, Diomande’s agents said the deal had not been done, terms had not been agreed, and that Romano had gone too early.

 

But Romano’s response was vindictive. A deeply personal attack on Plettenberg included the revelation of private messages in which the German had asked Romano for advice on increasing his own social media following and lavished him with praise. Romano even revealed how Plettenberg had told him: ‘Your work is my motivation.’

 

Plettenberg pointed to a Romano ‘done deal’ that never was – Marc Guehi from Crystal Palace to Liverpool – and said the Italian deleted his dud stories. There is only ever one winner on social media when you’re competing with someone who has millions of followers. Plettenberg was on the receiving end of a pile-on. But the German seemed to have hit a nerve. In a post around that time, Romano made a point of telling his followers that he did speak to more than one party.

You can take your pick of delicate negotiations declared done by Romano which are so far from conclusion that he cannot possibly have consulted all parties to undertake a journalistic job on it.

 

He called the conclusion of Ibrahima Konate’s new Liverpool deal earlier this summer, a few weeks before the player left for Real Madrid, with no Anfield deal signed. There was Joao Pedro’s ‘move’ to Newcastle, stated as fact a few weeks before he instead signed for Brighton. Florian Wirtz’s move from Bayer Leverkusen to Liverpool last summer was ten days from being finalised when Romano declared that one concluded: more guesswork.

 

The eight-minute YouTube video in which an excitable Romano discussed the concluded Diomande to Real Madrid deal included no mention of how, just two months earlier, he’d been just as animated about Bayern Munich’s Michael Olise being ‘the name of the secret star’ wanted by Real Madrid. ‘This dream signing, a bomba, a €150 million club record.’ Real issued a statement declaring no interest in Olise, who remains a Bayern player.

 

Romano’s profile and following has certainly built him contacts among the biggest movers and shakers in football who see him as beneficial to them and feed him stories. He is well connected with Jorge Mendes, with the inheritors of Mino Raiola’s agency and with Ali Rabat of the Epic agency, who handles so much Chelsea business that he is a de facto sixth sporting director at the club.

 

The fact that some of his agent contacts enjoy him posting photographs of themselves with their player on the jet flying him to a new club is a sign of how agenting has changed. Clubs used to consider it taboo for agents to promote themselves. These images have become a key tool for Romano, who tweets some of them with a @fabrizioromano watermark and presents them as ‘exclusive’. The fingerprints of Romano’s sources of information are provided by the private jet images, because those he talks to are generally in the frame, getting the exposure.

 

This is all part of an extraordinary output of 100 or more posts a day across all platforms, pushed out by Romano and his staff, conjuring the impression of him being at the centre of a whirlwind of seeming continuous transfer activity.

 

On his YouTube videos, he exudes vast self-confidence, taking his follower ‘family’ on what he presents as a journey into the market. ‘We jump into it together’. He uses rudimentary AI tools to curate a mental picture of a deal yet to be done, with images of players in the shirt of the club supposedly seeking them. A picture of Bruno Guimaraes running out at the Emirates Stadium, with a delighted Mikel Arteta looking on, was being tweeted days before the Brazilian signed. It’s relentless. The world of transfers and social media is a brutal one but no one else is doing it to this level.

 

‘Every single day there are updates. Every single minute. Every single second,’ Romano told his followers in one recent YouTube video. Another part of the strategy is to repeatedly issue posts on the same transfer, building a sense of constant movement while each ‘update’ adds nothing at all. Romano tweeted about Ronald Araujo’s loan move from Barcelona to Liverpool 13 times between first reporting the story and the transfer announcement.

Romano’s bumper social media following

Such is the hunger for transfer gossip online, Romano’s combined following on X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok (140.3 million) surpasses that of both Arsenal and Spurs.

 

Of course, the market does not work like this. Negotiations often grind on slowly and there are days at this time in the cycle when nothing significant happens. But for the many who crave a constant feed of transfer talk, any link between club and player will suffice, however thin. So will the endless tweets, creating the sense of a development and a saga when there is none. Stories and hard facts are a side-show to the social media whirl.

 

Staff at some clubs will not take Romano’s calls because of their frustration with a modus operandi in which, as they see it, he either jeopardises delicately poised transfer negotiations by claiming to be ahead of them or builds momentum by using his social media presence to help make a deal possible. Some in the game view him as a nuisance influencer, rather than a reporter.

 

Some agents feel the same. One was in the delicate process of getting the best deal for a British player who was reluctantly leaving the Premier League for a European club, only to find that a source linked to the selling club was feeding information to Romano about possible flight times for the private jet which would take that player away.

 

Managers such as Sir Alex Ferguson would certainly have had words to say about self-promotion like this and Peter Robinson, the legendary Liverpool chief executive who operated through stealth, would be spinning in his grave.

 

There is still the old paranoia in the agents’ world about a rival jumping on information about a deal, gatecrashing it and denying them their lucrative cut. But there are now many more individuals in the loop – from junior agency staff to big club recruitment teams – and some are dazzled by that big social media following.

 

Southampton, whose reasons for jealously guarding transfer information include wanting to produce excellent social media reveals of new signings for their fans, playfully trolled Romano after signing Mads Roerslev from Brentford, with a graphic stating his age, Premier League and career appearances and ‘Fabrizio Tweets: 0’.

 

Romano then tweeted news of Finn Azaz’s arrival as a ‘new striker’ from Middlesbrough, denying Saints the surprise factor of the video they were preparing. ‘Fab’s back, then’ the club tweeted, with a rolling eyes emoji, in response to Romano’s tweet about Azaz, who is actually an attacking midfielder.

In a sign that many followers of the game are tiring of his hyperbole and perceived sleight of hand, the major Reddit group ‘r/soccer’, a community of 8.8 million, has sought to restrict Romano content in their threads to exclusives only, to ‘limit his exposure and platforming’. The community’s administrators told members: ‘Romano has increasingly been accused (with validity) of siphoning off other journalists’ content and passing off as his own.’

 

It cited an ‘excessive spam aspect’ in which the content ‘increasingly moves away from important exclusives, and towards the drip-feeding of non-updates on transfer sagas that offer little original value, and instead amount to spam and the drowning out of other transfer stories that are less click-baity’. It cited what it called ‘the shill aspect’, and Romano’s ‘close associations with many clubs and agents’. Members of r/soccer were told that ‘several club subreddits’ had banned all posts about Romano. Chelsea’s has. R/soccer has since banned Romano content altogether.

 

Atletico Madrid were so incensed by Romano promoting a narrative about Julian Alvarez wanting to leave them for Barcelona that they published mocking posts depicting three Barcelona players, Lamine Yamal, Raphinha, and Pedri, wearing Atletico’s jersey with his deal-done catchphrase ‘Here We Go’ and accusing him of participating in a Barca ‘machine’ of ‘convenient leaks, fake news, constant disrespect’.

 

It was a funny, successful riposte, and proof that it is far easier for a club to challenge Romano than members of the journalistic community. When a British journalist accused him of artificially fuelling that Alvarez to Barca story in early July, in an attempt to make it happen for the Catalan club, Romano’s response was again highly personalised and spiteful.

 

He tweeted about some of the journalist’s transfer market stances from the previous summer which in the fulness of time had not come to pass. The reporter countered by republishing Romano’s 2022 tweet declaring ‘Joao Pedro to Newcastle – done deal’ and he was on intellectually far stronger ground. But, as in the Plettenberg case, it was the reporter who faced a pile-on.

 

In an information sphere where immediacy wins over editorial judgment, the merest suggestion of a deal feeds an enormous feedback loop in which headlines create market interest and market interest strengthens negotiating positions, which strengthen the suggestion floated in the first place.

 

But it was when Romano published a single source’s information as fact in the real world beyond transfer talk that the dangers of taking a chance and neglecting to do old-school checking were exposed in a most excruciating and devastating way.

 

After news surfaced that the former Chelsea, Newcastle and Everton player Christian Atsu was reported missing in an earthquake which hit Turkey in February 2023, Romano posted that the 31-year-old was alive.

 

He wrote: ‘He (Atsu) has now been rescued from the rubble and transported to hospital after suffering injuries to his right foot and suffering from breathing difficulties. Stay strong, Chris’. Atsu was in fact dead. His body was recovered several days later.

 

Romano does not appear to have ever apologised for that error, which an excellent study of his work by investigative journalist Nick Harris for his Sporting Intelligence website earlier this year found had caused distress to Atsu’s family.

 

The Milan-born Romano has received flattering write-ups in Columbia Journalism Review and L’Equipe. In the latter, last year, he said he employed two people to help him with ‘graphic design’ and another on ‘video editing’ but that he managed the ‘strictly editorial’ side himself. His exact income is unclear but an influencer platform called ‘Hafi’, the authority of which is unclear, suggested last year that he had earned around £300,000 in the January transfer window and was netting £3.9 million a year.

 

In the L’Equipe interview, he described his big football break, when an employee working in Barcelona’s La Masia academy asked him if he would write about two unknown players he had befriended, Mauro Icardi and Gerard Deulofeu, once of Everton. Romano obliged and when that contact, an Italian, started working with Icardi’s agent, he was given the exclusives on his moves to Sampdoria and Inter Milan. He was eventually recruited by Italy’s Sky Sport and displayed a self-assurance which made him a competitor to top dog Gianluca Di Marzio.

 

The helpful pieces about Icardi, written for a friend, revealed in microcosm how Romano would go on to build a transfer market empire on social media. His success has been built upon proximity to a network of agents, intermediaries and sporting directorate staff, all motivated by what access to his audience can bring them. ‘He is a vehicle for agent and club briefing. He forgoes any fact checking,’ says one source who has worked inside British football at an elite level.

 

Another who is sceptical about the way Romano works as an aide to contacts asks: ‘When information originates with people seeking to move a player, influence negotiations or shape public perception, where does reporting end and amplification begin?’

 

The question of precisely who Romano is willing to act as a vehicle for was thrown into the spotlight earlier this year when he broadcast a paid video clip, two minutes, 14 seconds in length and labelled as advertising, in which he endorsed what he called the ‘global humanitarian role’ of Saudi Arabia.

 

That is the same regime whose ruler, Mohammed bin Salman sanctioned the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was seized, murdered and dismembered with a bone saw.

 

This seemed like a serious misstep. L’Equipe called him into question. X even added a contextual note to Romano’s Saudi post, linking to various Amnesty International articles highlighting the kingdom’s lack of concrete progress on human rights.

 

Romano has been unwilling to discuss whether the Saudis were paying him, and if so, how much. But bigging up Saudi ‘human rights’ seemed to open doors.

 

The advertisement coincided with one of Romano’s trips to Saudi Arabia, where he was conveniently pitch-side when Cristiano Ronaldo warmed up before a game for Al Nassr against Al Hazem.

 

Ronaldo wandered over to shake his hand, in a scene carefully filmed and broadcast on Romano’s social networks and currently pinned to the top of his Instagram feed. It has been viewed millions of times on that platform alone. Romano also broke the news that Ronaldo would not be leaving his Saudi club.

 

Since Romano’s content is free, he has needed partner sponsors for income, including an online betting site, an AI content builder, a cryptocurrency builder, a cryptocurrency exchange and FIFA. McDonald’s and Panini joined a big roster of partners for his 2026 World Cup output.

 

The Sporting Intelligence investigation reported that an intermediary company claiming ties to Romano had contacted Norwegian clubs offering them paid promotion through Romano’s platforms in 2022.

 

The allegations, which first surfaced in Danish paper Tipsbladet, quoted a former director of the Norwegian club Valerenga, who said he had received emails offering a single Fabrizio Romano promotional social media post for 11,600 Norwegian kroner (£900) and a promotional video for 63,070 kroner (£4,900).

 

Analysis by the Norwegian media outlet Idrettspolitikk claimed that company purporting to act on behalf of Romano had been offering clubs a direct line to him. ‘You can submit the request directly to Fabrizio Romano here,’ one of the emails stated.

 

Romano has not responded to questions about that. We asked him to discuss with us his methods and the question marks which have been raised about him. As of last night, he had not responded. But on Tuesday, he gave a distinct sense that he feels his race is run in the transfer market information business.

 

Romano declared on LinkedIn that he was ‘probably not gonna continue into the transfer market industry as I’m doing right now for longer (sic). It’s time to change the approach, the view… but this will be another topic soon.’ True to form, he presented this as a ‘Here We Go’.

 

There were two million shares on that single post alone, though one of the 46,000 comments spoke for many who started following him before his output became an industry:

That's 5 minutes of my life wasted.

The fact it took you 5 minutes to read that is very telling.....