Any football fan will know the name Fabrizio Romano.
He is the man many of us look to when searching for reliable, up-to-date transfer information rather than the constant stream of gossip and hearsay the mainstream media provides us with. I can’t stand all that clickbait titled dross.
Romano is an interesting man because he is only young, yet in a relatively short space of time has become one of the most important voices in global football – and all he really does is announce transfer news.
He isn’t involved with any particular club – although he is known to be a Watford fan – he doesn’t work for any footballing organisation, and although he did work in sports media he is now an independent journalist with a very specific niche.
So how on earth did this young Italian become to go to guy for transfer news? Where does he get his information and why do people trust him more than almost any other news source when it comes to this very niche area of reporting?
Who is Fabrizio Romano?
Where Did He Come From?
Born in Naples in 1993, Fabrizio Romano was a football fanatic from an early age and started working in football journalism at just 16.
It was Garth Crooks of all people who discovered him. Romano is multi-lingual and they got chatting at an event Crooks was hosting. He was so impressed by Romano’s knowledge of the Italian game that he gave him a guest spot on his Team of the Week column for the BBC.
He is a very hard worker. Even in his teenage years he would write articles and send them in to newspapers in the hope of being published, and he ran his own blog which caught the attention of Sky Sports in Italy. He worked with Sky for many years, among other news outlets, but the transfer that really got him started was Mauro Icardi moving from Barcelona to Sampdoria. Icardi was a youth player at the time, but he soon established himself in the first team at his new club and the pair kept in touch. When Icardi lined up a transfer from Sampdoria to Inter Milan in 2013 it was much bigger news, and he gave Romano the heads up months before anyone else. This was a huge break for the journalist.
With his new found respect and profile, alongside the many contacts he was making in the industry thanks to his work at Sky, Romano quickly became one of the most trusted sources of transfer news in Italy.
Being one of the younger generation, he was already using social media. His Twitter (X) account was set up in 2011 and his Instagram account was created in 2014. Indeed, it was social media that really put him on the global stage.
In 2020, he announced that Manchester United were signing Bruno Fernandes, and his platforms blew up. Since then his X account has grown to 22 million followers as of 2024, while he has 32 million on Instagram.
@topeleven Favourite football transfer story by @fabrizioromano! ✍ What’s yours? 🤔#Transfers #Football #FabrizioRomano #TopEleven #ForYou ♬ sonido original – Top Eleven
The football world outside of Italy began to take notice, and crucially, players themselves had direct access to him via DMs and so on. People would contact him for information, to get the truth about rumours they had heard and things like that. He would help if he could and if it was appropriate, so everyone held him in high esteem and gave him information in return.
Thus, he became the man to know for anything and everything to do with football transfers around the world.
Hard Work
None of this happened by chance.
Fabrizio Romano is an incredibly hard worker, rumoured to sleep about 5 hours a night, and if he is awake he is working.
He learned this work ethic from his mentor, Gianluca Di Marzio, a renowned Italian sports journalist who took Romano under his wing early in his career.
It is said that Romano is on his phone for 14 hours a day in the busiest times of the year, regularly recording over 17 hours worth of screen time in a 24 hour period.
Those additional hours are likely spent recording videos for his Youtube channel (2.3 million subscribers) and posting to social media, where he doesn’t just post news but interacts with the public as well, answering questions where he can.
Add to this all of the time he spends travelling to meet people, recording his podcasts and videos, and attending events and you wonder how he manages.
His hard work has been rewarded with more than a super successful career too. He was one of Forbes 30 Under 30 in Marketing and also won Best Football Journalist at the Globe Soccer Awards in 2022. At the same event in 2023, he took the gong for Best Digital Journalist.
Honesty and Integrity
Two words sorely lacking in the majority of todays media are honesty and integrity, yet Romano has both in spades.
He only ever talks about transfers that he knows for sure are either in discussion or 100% confirmed, and he never bad mouths anybody else when questioned.
For example, if another journalists has announced a transfer rumour that Romano has not and he is asked about the truth of it, he will never say the other journalist is wrong, he will just talk about what he himself knows for sure.
This means Romano has a cast iron reputation and people like that.
If I hear any transfer rumours the first thing I do is check Romano’s Twitter account to see if he has said anything about it. If he hasn’t, I assume it’s nonsense.
That is the power of being well informed and staying strong when it comes to confirming stories before reporting on them. He usually is the first to break big news, but you get the impression he would rather be right than first.
There is a level of respect here too. For example, Romano knew that Toni Kroos was going to retire well in advance of the official announcement, but he also knew that Kroos wanted to make the announcement himself. Romano could have had an exclusive, but chose to keep quiet about it out of respect for the player.
That’s pure class, and it shows players, agents, and clubs that they can trust him with their important information.
Here We Go!
It used to be sung on the terraces by football fans: “here we go, here we go, here we go”.
These days, however, it means something else entirely, and that is all down to Fabrizio Romano.
It was totally unintentional.
He had been reporting on a possible transfer for months and months, so when it finally became official, he broke the news with the now famous words, and it caught on. His followers started asking if he could “give the here we go” to transfer rumours. People now refer to it as his catchphrase, and clubs themselves even use it when making their own transfer announcements.
Here We Go! has become the universal language that a transfer deal has been confirmed, but even though everyone now uses it, no one would debate that it belongs to Romano.
If Romano starts a post with those words, it means the deal is done. It’s like a stamp of authority.
These days the young Italian is as much of a social media influencer as anything else, but he’s still a journalist so his channels are open.
If you happen to have some juicy transfer information you overheard as you were passing your nearest big football club, you can reach out to him on his email: [email protected]
(Yes, it’s his real email address!)