"HERE WE GO!": the lowdown on "football journalist" Fabrizio Romano

The Italian "influencer" who has never worked as a real journalist, has 100m+ followers on social media and leverages them for cash. This is a tale about modern sports media

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The Italian football media personality, Fabrizio Romano, self-identifies as “a journalist.” That’s what the 33-year-old told The New York Times in an interview in 2022, saying: “I’m not a star. I am a journalist, and a journalist is an intermediary.”

He has long been controversial, for reasons we’ll get to quickly, but it’s safe to say that whether he’s actually a journalist (he’s not, in any traditional sense), or an “influencer”, or just someone who will do and say whatever someone pays him to say, he has an absolutely huge following on social media.

He has 27 million followers on X, formerly known as Twitter, and 43 million on Instagram, and 30 million on Facebook, and 21 million on TikTok. Why? Because he posts primarily about football transfer news, some of which is genuinely exclusive (because of his various arrangements with sources and clubs) and much of which has been gleaned from elsewhere, sometimes but far from always attributed to the actual journalists who unearthed the information in the first place.

Romano is a polarising figure and became even more so earlier this week when posting a video lasting 2 minutes and 14 seconds (view it here and screen grab below) effectively endorsing the supposed humanitarian regime of Saudi Arabia, where the de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), orchestrated the 2018 assassination of a journalist critic, Jamal Khashoggi.

Khashoggi was killed and dismembered with a bone saw in Istanbul, by an MBS hit squad, before his remains were incinerated in a barbecue pit.

(Read the US intelligence files on this case for more details, if you can stomach them. The 15-man hit squad were flown to Turkey and back from Saudi Arabia in a private plane, which, by the way, was later used by Newcastle United for warm weather training trips, since Newcastle have effectively become owned by Saudi Arabia via the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, the PIF).

OK, no big deal. A bloke in his early 30s, after a decade and more of scrabbling to become an authoritative “ITK” (“in the know”) person in the world of football transfers, has now become so popular that he can charge huge sums to shill for despotic human-rights abusing regimes.

Well done to him, and perhaps that’s just the world we live in.

You will notice that his controversial Saudi advertorial came with an “#ad” hashtag, signalling he had been paid to advertise whatever content he was distributing this time. (Pro-Saudi propaganda in this case).

He has often declared that what he does is advertorial, whether for bookmakers Betway’s ‘Betway Scores’ app (up to 10 times this year already), a Juventus crypto-currency partner, and Pepsi, and FIFA (note the “paid partnership” message on that TikTok), and on and on.

Most of the time he doesn’t state that what he is tweeting or promoting has been paid for, and therein lies one problem among many.

Journalist? Charlatan more like.

Since asking my own social media followers earlier this week who might have any insight into Fabrizio Romano’s world, and how he effectively makes money by saying what paying clients want him to say (often), I have been inundated with examples of his mis-steps and frankly woeful conduct.

As one correspondent and former associate of Romano told me, “probably the most disgusting thing he’s ever done” (in this person’s opinion) was in 2023, in the immediate aftermath of the Turkey-Syria earthquakes that claimed around 60,000 lives.

On his Facebook page, in a post from 2023 (below), Romano told his followers on 7 February 2023 that the footballer Christian Atsu (formerly of Porto, Chelsea, Everton and Newcastle among others) was alive and in hospital after being found with a foot injury and breathing difficulties. Actually Atsu was dead, and his body was found on 18 February.

An actual journalist, with any scintilla of credibility, would have reported that Atsu was alive according to whoever provided that information. But Romano instead stated as fact that Atsu was alive, and in recent days I’ve been told that his family took hope from this declaration from an “authorative” source.

In reality, Romano’s reporting of Atsu being alive was empty bullshit, circulated widely without any checks.

Romano was tragically and categorically wrong, but the fact that he posted it to millions of followers (with ZERO mention of his supposed source, which turned out to be false) gave false hope to the player’s family.

I use this example because yes, it’s extreme, but if you’re going to tell millions of people information on a literally life-and-death matter that is so appallingly wrong, how careful are you going to be about telling them the truth about a football transfer?

Fabrizio Romano and “stories for cash”

Romano became the subject of (mild) media scrutiny in 2024 after it was reported that he was making social media posts for cash, not least in Scandinavia.

In February and March 2024 Idrettspolitikk.no wrote a piece on football clubs in Scandinavia being approached with offers to purchase publicity through the social media channels of Romano. This was a follow-up of a story first highlighted by the Danish newspaper Tipsbladet.

The Danish publication reported on 28 February 2024 that it had reviewed documents showing a company claiming ties to Romano had contacted clubs offering paid promotion through his platforms.

Former marketing director Mehran Amundsen-Ansari of the Norwegian club Vålerenga FC confirmed to Norwegian journalist Andreas Selliaas that he received such an approach in 2022.

“I remember being completely caught off guard and thinking it had to be a joke,” Amundsen-Ansari told Idrettspolitikk.no.

Amundsen-Ansari served four years as marketing director at Vålerenga after joining from HamKam. He has since returned to the Hamar-based club.

According to Amundsen-Ansari, the unusual inquiry was discussed internally at the club, and colleagues decided to continue the conversation to see if the offer was genuine.

“And then there were quite a few emails back and forth,” he said.

He said the [intermediary] company offered services ranging from spreading rumors about players available for transfer to creating buzz around the club itself.

Emails reviewed by Idrettspolitikk.no show the company claiming to act on behalf of Romano and offering clubs a direct line to him.

“You can submit the request directly to Fabrizio Romano here,” one of the emails stated.

According to one message seen by Selliaas, the price for a single Fabrizio social media post was listed at 11,600 Norwegian kroner (around €1,000), plus VAT.

The outreach reportedly came from a representative of the company Memmo, which at the time did most of its business offering personalized video greetings from celebrities.

On Memmo’s website, users could order a personal video greeting from Romano for about 2,065 kroner.

Emails offering promotion also included links to a registration form for video promotions, where clubs could submit a message and preferred publication time. When Selliaas began investigating the case, the form allowed users to book a promotional video for 63,070 kroner.

Amundsen-Ansari said Vålerenga never made use of the service.

“It was never an option for us to pay those amounts,” he told Selliaas.

“In my seven years in top-level football I’ve received many strange inquiries, but never anything like this. This is supposed to be one of the world’s most famous ‘journalists.’ It’s completely unserious,” he said.

He added that the episode changed how he viewed Romano’s work.

“After this incident, I stopped following him on social media,” he said.

Not long before this, Romano reported detailed information about the record transfer of striker Andrej Ilić from Vålerenga to LOSC Lille in a deal reportedly worth up to 50 million kroner.

Asked whether Vålerenga had been contacted by Romano or a company claiming ties to him to promote the transfer, the club’s managing director Svein Graff said: “No, VIF did not receive any such offers.”

Idrettspolitikk.no contacted the Memmo representative who sent the emails to clubs in Norway and Denmark but did not receive a response. Later it was informed that Memmo had changed owners and that the client lists from the former owner was no longer available. They claimed they did not have the opportunity to find out if Romano had a deal with them.

Romano was also contacted and asked whether he had used Memmo for marketing promotional access to clubs or whether he charged for promoting players through his social media channels.

He was sent the following questions on WhatsApp by Selliaas:

• Hi Fabrizio Romano, I am a Norwegian journalist. I have seen emails from Memmo offering a club in Norway to help drive engagement and excite supporters on new players or help promote players for sale from your social media platforms for a price of NOK 11.600+VAT. 1) Do you have/have had a deal with Memmo to organize deals like this? 2) Do you take money to promote players clubs on your social media platforms?

He called Selliaas and said he had zero knowledge of Memmo and did not take money to promote clubs but did not want to comment on this in public. He did not want to help outlets like Idrettspolitikk.no to get coverage, he said. That phone call lasted seven minutes.

When the story came out, he sent Selliaas a message via Idrettspolitikk.no. “Hello Andreas. Hope you are OK. Can you talk? Thanks?”

Selliaas and Romano talked and Romano was not happy about the article and told Selliaas that he was considering taking legal action. That phone call lasted 14 minutes. Since then, there has been no contact between Idrettspolitikk.no and Romano, and no legal action.

Romano: a chancer and bluffer since he was a teenager

After posting on social media earlier this week about Romano shilling for Saudi Arabia, I have been inundated with messages from people who have known him since be began his career as a “journalist” in his teens.

I will protect the identities of these people for now, but in case Fabrizio Romano decides to become litigious, he should know they are willing to go on the record, and have documentary evidence to support their claims about him.

When Romano was 18, he worked for the website FCInterNews, an independent portal of the club he supports, Inter Milan. According to one colleague at that time, Romano “secured” an exclusive interview with a major Inter star … except he didn’t. Romano was, in effect, “catfished”, and did the “interview” with a bluffer pretending to be the star.

When it was published, both the club and the player made public declarations that the player had never spoken to Romano, and, according to the source, Romano always insisted in fact he had done the interview.

“He was completely unrepentant,” a source close to that story tells me. “He can’t acknowledge mistakes. He is a always reluctant to give any credit to people who help him. He considers himself to be a journalist, but actually he does whatever anyone pays him to do.”

Another former colleague of Romano, an Italian journalist, has told Sporting Intelligence that he, and not Romano, coined Romano’s catchphrase “Here we go!”

The colleague had between 300 and 400 Twitter followers at the time that Romano was getting into the thousands, and the latter warned him: “Please don’t use my slogan.”

In a message sent in mid-June 2021, Romano again told the colleague not to use “Here we go”. And the following month, after Romano posted a hugely popular tweet about Eduardo Camavinga moving to Real Madrid (a story his colleague had in fact broken first), Romano, according to that colleague, told him to “be quiet.”

I have contacted Fabrizio Romano for comment and he hasn’t responded.

I have spoken to multiple people about his career that I haven’t reported in this piece, for various reasons.

As a reader you might well be asking: “Why are you doing this?”

All I can say in response to that is Fabrizio Romano is not a journalist, and his shilling for Saudi Arabia this week annoyed me immensely as it (again) debased the “normal” person’s view of what actual journalism should be.