Gavin Cooney

FOOTBALL JOURNALISM HAS had its many vanguards over the years.

Hugh McIlvanney, Brian Glanville, and Eamon Dunphy were among the first men to lend the craft some literary credibility, while Nick Hornby was the most successful of the literary men to prove the game appealed to the middle classes whose disposable income would go on to backbone Sky Sports and the Premier League. 

David Goldblatt, Simon Kuper, and Jonathan Wilson meanwhile showed the game as a worthy lens for historical, political, and sociological writing; while Wilson and Michael Cox have proved there’s great writing to be mined from the game’s tactics and strategy.

Which brings us to the journalist iconoclasts of our present age: The Transfer Scoopsman. 

We’re talking here about your David Ornsteins, your Ben Jacobses, and, of course, your Fabrizio Romanos; these restless, story-breaking men engaged in a forever war with each other and against the press release. 

They have left us non-transfer scoopsmen in their wake, as it is they who have accumulated millions of followers and whose work has come to define modern football. 

Football’s transfer market has arguably become a bigger story than the football itself, but what is inarguable is the pervasiveness of transfer stories and gossip nowadays, and it is in this ubiquity that Romano has marked himself out as the defining figure of his age. 

Where Ornstein appears to work on a low volume: high impact ratio, Romano is all volume, to the point that it feels like the volume is the impact.

He has broken some major stories in his time, in fairness, including Bruno Fernandes’ move to Man United, Zinedine Zidane’s resignation as Real Madrid manager, and Bayern Munich’s sacking of Julian Nagelsmann, but Romano is also an inheritor of that quality which underpinned Sky Sports News’ heyday: the sense that there is always something important happening. 

The human resources never stop, and so neither does Fabrizio. On Wednesday of this week, for instance, he posted 48 times on X, starting at 7am and ending at 11.09pm. 

Now very little of this would pass an editor’s definition of news, but that’s not the point: the point is that these posts have the appearance of news, and is thus another morsel to be devoured by the never-to-be-sated masses. 

Hence Romano has perfected the art of the micro-development.

Previously we understood transfers as having the following stages: Club A identifies Player X; Club A negotiate a fee with Club B, who employ Player X; Club A negotiate a salary and contract length with Player X and his agent; Player X signs said contract and is publicly unveiled. 

Romano has inserted a series of additional events and phases in the process. Where previously a player would receive the green light to join a new club, in RomanoLand the player receives all manner of green lights: to start negotiations; to sign “the final agreements”; to travel for a medical. (The latter is usually accompanied by a photo of player and agent on a private jet.)

All of this business is serious but some of it is more serious than the rest. Romano tells us there are differences between a mere approach and a “serious approach”; between a between a proposal and an “important proposal.”

And in a stunning grammatical innovation, he has introduced gradations to nouns. We have benightedly laboured for too long under the misunderstanding that a thing was either agreed or not agreed. Romano now tells us there are agreements and then there are total agreements. James Joyce wasn’t up to this level of experimentation. 

Crucial also to the appearance of Constant News is the ability to stretch out a single piece of information, which brings us to another Romano innovation. 

This is what we will call the writing of a single piece of information in three different ways; in which three differently-worded sentences convey the same, single piece of information; and the same, single piece of information is communicated in different ways using three sentences.

An example this week from the Alexander-Isak-to-Liverpool saga.

Alexander Isak makes his move and it was always clear since July: he only wants Liverpool.

He doesn’t even want to discuss any other option with Newcastle, and never considered Al Hilal despite reports.

Liverpool Football Club.

He is also brilliantly entrepreneurial, and in creating his Here We Go trademark he has an instant gateway to any number of commercial partnerships, which are lucrative given he has almost 26 million followers on X alone. He has also sold t-shirts bearing some of his previous story-breaking tweets.

Speaking on Gary Lineker’s podcast a couple of years ago, Romano admitted many of his sources on stories are agents, but he does get messages directly from players asking him to post about them, to help them get moves. He did not say whether he agrees to play along. 

S0, this column is not here to sneer at Fabrizio Romano’s breathless reporting of a 2002-born talent you’ve never heard of joining a mid-table side in La Liga. The scoopsman is what is most valued in the industry now, and their work has seeped into how the rest of us talk and write about the game, as conversations around the sport have become utterly financialised. When a young player breaks through now, for instance, their potential is expressed in terms of their possible future transfer fee, while the general fan now needs to have a remedial knowledge of phrases like PSR headroom and contract amortisation.

This has also given rise to the phenomenon of the celebrity sporting director. Bill Shankly’s old line about there being a holy trinity of player, manager and fan would now have to be adjusted to include whoever at the club leads player recruitment.  

This all works to the benefit of the capitalist class of people now pumping money into the game, who are slowly dropping the pretence that their interest in football clubs is anything other than a naked financial investment.  

And it is these capitalists’ bets and barterings that the scoopsman is relentlessly serving up to us.

The irony, of course, is transfer activity is not always a strong indicator as to on-field success. Liverpool, for instance, are reigning champions because they didn’t sign anyone aside from Federico Chiesa last summer. But its appeal is perhaps rooted in the fact it’s separate to what happens on the grass, for the transfer market kindles hope for all supporters without having to endure the reality of what the scoreboard says. 

Ultimately, the enormous success of scoopsmen like Romano shows that football journalism has now entered its post-modern phase. If there is nothing new under the Sun, there is nothing new in The Sun. So if there’s no mass-market fascination left in what is made, then the game must manufacture fascination in how it’s made.

Fabrizio Romano says Here We Go, but he also shows us Where We’ve Gone.