As footballing romance stories go, few were more cinematic. On August 27, 2021, Cristiano Ronaldo, already one of the greatest players the sport had ever produced, was confirmed to be returning to Manchester United. After more than a decade playing in Spain and Italy, Ronaldo was coming back to the storied club where he first became a global icon. United was in crisis—who better to pull them out of it than Ronaldo?
Weeks of rumors and subterfuge were settled with three words, when superstar football transfer journalist Fabrizio Romano announced the deal to viewers on his YouTube channel with his staccato catchphrase: Here we go. “There were like 98,000 people following the live stream,” he later recalled. “More people watching me from my home, reporting on a story, than people at Camp Nou for a Barcelona game.” The moment, Romano said in a 2024 interview, was a highlight of his career. In the comments, the adulation was divided between the superstar and the man breaking the news. “Fabrizio has cemented himself in the hearts of United fans,” one viewer wrote. “The ultimate winner of this window is Fabrizio,” gushed another.
That the reunion ended badly—Ronaldo departed United after fifteen months, following a public fallout and little success on the pitch—barely registers in the memory of football transfer addicts. For a certain kind of hyper-online fan, the real thrill had been delivered on that livestream; everything thereafter was peripheral. The rush is what such fans call “transfer dopamine”: the addictive cycle of rumors, negotiations, confirmations, and announcements that surround football’s opaque player market. In the social media era, that market has become its own spectacle, one that, in some corners of the sport, rivals and sometimes even supersedes the game itself.
Romano, a thirty-three-year-old Italian polyglot, has spent his entire adult life covering the transfer market. A two-time recipient of journalism medals at the Globe Soccer Awards, he is not, by any conventional measure, a football journalist. He rarely writes about the sport itself. Instead, he transcribes the machinations around it: who is moving where, for how much, brokered by whom. That a phrase signaling a completed financial transaction generates the same sort of emotional release as a last-minute winner tells us something important, not just about Romano, but about the state of modern football. Few figures better capture the sense that the real “game” is taking place somewhere far from manicured pitches of London, Paris, and Madrid.
In this sense, Romano is a leading superhero in FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s cinematic universe, where decisions are announced rather than contested, where power is celebrated rather than investigated, and where the excesses of player trading has become, for millions of fans, as compelling as anything undertaken by their idols in studded boots. Understanding Romano means understanding what has become of the beautiful game.
Romano’s origin story may sound familiar to football lovers raised on plucky underdog stories of kids emerging from nowhere to succeed at the highest level. At seventeen, writing mostly for small football blogs and websites in Italy, he was given a tip by a man in a bar frequented by agents and players: a youth player at Barcelona, Mauro Icardi, was moving to an Italian club. When the scoop proved correct, he parlayed it into an entry-level gig at Sky Sports Italy and a rapidly expanding stable of sources. Almost instantaneously, a career was born.
The method he developed from there was old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting: he worked the ritzy hotels and restaurants in Milan where agents and executives congregate during the transfer window to pump contacts, build relationships, and trade information. The Italian football press, fuelled by three sports-only daily newspapers and a culture of transfer speculation that was its own cottage industry, had long nurtured this kind of journalism. Romano was a natural inheritor, with a twist: he had a young man’s understanding of digital media that his established colleagues did not.
Romano did not invent football’s transfer market, nor did he create the agents, backroom deals, overhyped teenagers, shady entourages, and swirls of rumor that have always surrounded the movement of players in the sport’s unique trading system. What makes him significant is that he transformed all of that noise into a media format perfectly calibrated for the present moment: constant, and consequence-free.
By helping to transform the transfer market into a minute-by-minute drama, he’s ensured that for a certain subsection of fans, the decisive moment in their footballing lives isn’t necessarily when a goal is scored on the pitch. For many, that moment of ecstasy is now delivered with a flurry of thumbs, condensed to his three-word catchphrase when a deal crosses the line: here we go.
In doing so, he’s become the most followed sports journalist on earth, with forty-two million followers on Instagram, twenty-seven million on X, and twenty million on TikTok—a volume that puts him ahead of most of the players and clubs (Arsenal has thirty-two million Instagram followers, for instance) that he covers. It has been argued that he is the most famous journalist on earth, in any field. The followings of popular political media figures pale by comparison: Tucker Carlson has around six million on Instagram and twenty-two million X, while Rachel Maddow barely surpasses a million on each platform.
Social media is uniquely suited to the bite-sized, time-sensitive nature of transfer news, and Romano recognized this earlier than most football journalists. Even before Elon Musk purchased Twitter and rebranded it as X, the platform rewarded speed and volume above all else, particularly accuracy and nuance. Algorithms and the audiences shaped by them have little patience for information that hedges its bets.
Here, Romano’s clipped, distinctive style arguably helped define the voice that now feels native to the platform. In the process, it has helped spawn a generation of news influencers who post second-hand information and rumor in real time, largely unconstrained by traditional journalistic conventions. “I can imagine my life without water and food,” he once said. “I can’t imagine my life without Twitter.”
The former New York Times football correspondent Rory Smith labelled him “the prophet of the deal” and asked, not entirely rhetorically, whether Romano was a participant rather than an observer in the market. Another veteran journalist, speaking anonymously for fear of harming industry relationships, is less circumspect. “He is a gun for hire,” the reporter said, “a parasite on the corpse of football.”
Uncomfortable questions about Romano’s operation are not new, though they have done little to slow the emergence of a legion of imitators. He has occasionally addressed his methods, describing his “obsession” as being respectful to his sources, and arguing that “a journalist is an intermediary.” In practice, however, his model seems highly transactional. His primary accountability appears to be to his audience and to the sources who feed him information, rather than to any formal editorial framework or codified set of journalistic standards.
“He is a gun for hire,” the reporter said, “a parasite on the corpse of football.”
One football journalist with knowledge of the market says Romano’s sponsorship deals, collaborations, and ambassadorships, in which he plugs brands including Nike, LG, and Visit Maldives, can likely earn him upwards of $300,000 per endorsement. Commercial deals may not be disqualifying for a reporter—prominent media personalities are often not shy about earning a dollar—but the nature of Romano’s sponsorships and the way his platform has been used raises tougher questions.
In 2024, speaking to Idrettspolitikk, a Norwegian publication focused on sports policy and governance, the marketing manager of Vålerenga alleged that a firm associated with Romano had contacted the club two years prior, requesting payment in exchange for generating social media buzz around players they were trying to sell. “In my seven years in top football, I have received many strange inquiries, but never like this,” he said. According to documents reviewed by the publication, an individual post cost $1,100, a video was priced at over $6,000, while a mere “personal greeting”—think “congratulations”—from Romano on a completed deal was $200. Tipsbladet, Denmark’s leading football publication, had previously reported that Romano contacted Danish clubs with a similar offer. (After Romano complained, Denmark’s press board criticized the report in a decision that found it “could be considered harmful, offensive or have a defamatory effect.”)
Romano hardly obscures the transactional nature of his reporting, however. He regularly credits the superagents behind big deals, like Pini Zahavi (Robert Lewandowski, Neymar Jr.), Rafaela Pimenta (Erling Haaland), and Epic Sports’ Ali Barat (who represents several Chelsea players and began receiving shout-outs from Romano in the summer of 2024).
Epic’s own PR manager, in a moment of startling candor, described his mandate as running the company’s “public relations as though the agency was a major international club,” hyping its transfers and Barat’s central role in them. The agency produces press releases headlined with lines about its owner like: “Where others react, he builds…. Where others stall, he delivers.” If it sounds far-fetched, consider this: Romano’s first sit-down interview on his YouTube channel was with Lionel Messi. His second was with Ali Barat—as in all of Romano’s appearances, his phone was visibly in his hand throughout—after which Barat invited him for a follow-up at his home in Dubai.
More damaging still was Romano’s coverage of Mason Greenwood, who was suspended by Manchester United in 2022 after police became aware of audio recordings and images alleging physical and sexual abuse. (Greenwood has denied these claims, and police charges against the footballer were dropped in 2023.) Between May 2024 and December 2025, Romano published a series of nineteen posts that boosted the player to an unusual degree. Although Romano covered the physical and sexual abuse charges in 2022, his subsequent updates rarely referenced the circumstances of Greenwood’s departure, and instead moved well beyond reporting his transfer to Olympique de Marseille, highlighting debut goals and man-of-the-match awards in a tone more celebratory than neutral. (Romano has a record of taking interest in less controversial players as well—he has a long history of highlighting and defending Real Madrid midfielder Eduardo Camavinga, among others.)
Whether financial or other arrangements underpinned them is unknown. What is knowable is that Romano’s platform was deployed in service of rehabilitating someone whose conduct had been serious enough to prompt a criminal investigation, with sparing acknowledgement of that context.
With regard to both the Norwegian league and Greenwood, what Romano could potentially offer is clear: publicity and—put diplomatically—reputation management. What could football’s best-known media figure offer others?
None of this, on its own, makes Romano a uniquely bad actor. Football has long had journalists who were vehicles for agents and clubs, knowingly or not, and the transfer market was unscrupulous long before Romano arrived. In some ways, one could argue that Romano has provided value to transfer reporting. For decades, it was common for outrageous rumors to spread widely in tabloids and, often, in newspapers—even otherwise reputable ones. In some ways, Romano has provided a degree of legitimacy to a poorly regulated rumor mill that was previously lacking it.
He is, moreover, hardly an innovator in global sports media. His efforts follow in the wake of other deal-obsessed reporters, like the retired NBA scoophound Adrian Wojnarowski or ESPN’s NFL guru Adam Schefter. In many ways, he is analogous to another young media star, Shams Charania, an NBA reporter who occupies a similarly muddled role somewhere between journalist and influencer, and whose chummy relationships with agents, teams, and, increasingly, sports-betting companies often raises ethical quandaries.
What makes Romano significant is what he represents about football’s capture by economic forces, where players occupy positions on spreadsheets and “doing good business” has become as critical to success as having a striker who bangs in thirty goals a season. It is an ecosystem that has flourished under the FIFA presidency of Gianni Infantino.
The Swiss administrator swept to power in 2016 on promises of reforming global football’s notorious corruption problem. He has spent the intervening decade making his predecessor, Sepp Blatter, look upright and restrained. With a particular fondness for cozying up to dictators and autocrats, he has accepted a friendship medal from Vladimir Putin, sat ringside at a boxing match with the murderous Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, invented a fraudulent “FIFA Peace Prize” for President Trump, maintained a residence in Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup, and overseen a bidding process that all but ensured Saudi Arabia was awarded hosting duties for the 2034 tournament. Expanding the Club World Cup with Saudi backing to increase his power over the powerful European football body, he had his own name engraved twice on its trophy, alongside a passage crediting himself for the creation of the tournament. Last year, he showed up two hours late to his own FIFA Congress, delayed due to a trip with Donald Trump in the Gulf, prompting European delegates to walk out.
The man who was supposed to clean up football has turned out to be its most flamboyant courtier, genuflecting to whoever holds the biggest check. He has presided over a fundamental shift in what—and for whom—professional football is. As Infantino has cozied up to petrostates and autocrats and increasingly transformed international soccer into an arena for the superrich, a similar shift has occurred at the club level. There, the game has been increasingly financialized, opened up to corporate cowboys and private equity, drawn to the idea of player trading as an asset class. Ultrarich investors have started buying up teams and assembling multi-club portfolios, raising serious integrity issues that have been largely swept under the carpet.
As a result, the transfer market has exploded: in 2025, men’s football transfer spending increased fifty percent from the previous year, to $13.08 billion, with a record 86,158 international transfers completed. The transfer window has become akin to football’s postseason, with its own prizes—and its own stars.
Romano is the media figure that this world both produced and required. History, rivalries, tactics, match reports, even banal discussions over refereeing decisions are not Romano’s idea of football. The drama is reduced to action in the glowing device in our hands, engagement with his audience generated through viewing the game through individuals (“Who’s been your Man of the Match?”) rather than clubs. The flow of assets and money between teams—that’s where the real rivalries are. That’s also increasingly where fan attention is focused.
Consider the trajectory of football’s most famous sounds. For a previous generation, not so long ago, the apex was Martin Tyler’s howl as Sergio Agüero’s goal crossed the line in the dying seconds of the 2011–12 Premier League season, seeing Manchester City overhaul bitter rivals Manchester United to win their first league title in forty-four years: “Agueroooooo!” For millions of fans today, the equivalent is “here we go,” posted by Romano upon confirmation of the closing of a transfer deal. Football’s narrative power, for so long directing the dreams of billions, has moved from events on the pitch to the surrounding financial machinery. This is not entirely Romano’s doing, but he has been its most effective chronicler, and its most powerful accelerant.
The Infantino age has been one of unrelenting content. As the era defined by the rivalry of two of the all-time greats, Messi and Ronaldo, recedes, the game is transitioning into something new. Once dominated by a handful of genuine superstars, it is now played by a production line of players who are tasked with participating in an enormous, almost inconceivable, and extraordinarily lucrative volume of football: domestic leagues and cups, continental tournaments, expanded playoffs, Club World Cups, Olympic competitions, junior tournaments, international friendlies, international qualifiers. One young Barcelona starlet, Pedri, played seventy-three games in the 2020–21 season, aged only eighteen. The following season, he played only twenty-two games for his club, and has been hampered by injuries ever since.
In this environment, clubs and fans alike have become preoccupied with the search for gems. Instead of cultivating Pedri, they want to invest in a rich seam of several kinda-Pedris, a more experienced version and an up-and-comer behind them, who—if they can’t break through—can theoretically be traded for profit. The transfer window then becomes the moment where anything seems possible, before the season reveals what is actually true. Romano is the P. T. Barnum of that fantasy, before the crushing reality of football takes place.
Romano is not, it should be said, operating outside the norms of sports journalism—he is operating at their logical extreme. Mainstream football reporters often work under strict interview embargo rules; are frequently briefed by clubs on the understanding that they will reproduce those briefings without attribution or scrutiny; and have long been used, wittingly and unwittingly, to float rumors and sanitize reputations. Romano has simply removed the pretense, and has dispensed with the notion that reporters should add value to their reporting—or, for that matter, act outside the interests of their sources. His “trust my network” model replaces explicit sourcing with brand authority: you believe him because powerful people have decided he’s their man. He provides a constant stream of activity—posts, updates, confirmations, denials—without providing insight into how power actually operates in the game.
But recent events are beginning to strain even those willing to give him a pass. In March, as bombs reigned down across the Middle East during the U.S.-led Operation Epic Fury, he ran an ad on his social accounts. The post simply read “Global Humanitarian Role of Saudi Arabia,” and featured a two-minute, fourteen-second video extolling the virtues of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center. The organization was founded in 2015, shortly after the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen began. While it has carried out relief work internationally, its efforts are concentrated in Yemen, where the war has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Romano understands, perhaps, that his audience cares more that he is consistent and reliable, rather than that he is ethical, or even truthful. It is his constant presence that creates the illusion of transparency, while the actual workings of the market remain as opaque as they have always been. What’s more troubling is that he has in large part normalized this sort of transaction-based reporting. Football—as Romano, with his knack for directly translating idioms between languages, might say—is in an important moment. As supporters “insist” that clubs“find solutions,” it is clear that players, clubs, and fans alike are all tuned into his way of thinking.
Infantino, meanwhile, has understood the same lesson from a different direction. When he unveiled the Club World Cup trophy, he did not call a press conference. He first presented it in a meeting at the Oval Office with President Donald Trump, following it up with an appearance on popular influencer IShowSpeed’s YouTube channel. For this year’s World Cup, he crowbarred in “hydration breaks” under the guise of player welfare, allowing broadcast partners to sell additional advertising. In doing so, he will arguably change the tournament, and perhaps the sport, existentially: a game of two halves is becoming one of four quarters.
Romano and Infantino are not, in any literal sense, collaborators. But they are operating with the same instincts, toward the same ends: more product, more content, more noise, less scrutiny. Football’s power, as a result, hides in plain sight. It broadcasts itself through Romano’s catchphrase, and through Infantino’s bizarre appearances, and through the sheer volume of transfer activity. Everyone is too busy watching the flow to notice what is going on beneath it.
Romano is, in the end, a figure of his time: a symptom rather than a cause. He exists because the game created him, because the market, with its influx of nation-states, billionaires, chancers, and crooks, needed someone to narrate its own importance back to itself. That he has done so with such skill, reach, and determination—and with cheerful indifference to the moral and ethical questions raised by his reporting style—makes him the embodiment of the Infantino era. In the year when Donald Trump was awarded Infantino’s hastily convened FIFA Peace Prize, Fabrizio Romano is its not-yet-imagined literature laureate.