Ken Early: The ‘world’s biggest football reporter’ reveals the value of saying nothing

Last Tuesday, Fabrizio Romano posted a video extolling the virtues of Saudi Arabia’s King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Centre. Romano droned on for a couple of minutes about how the Saudi charity initiative had helped to clear landmines, treat blindness and deafness, separate conjoined twins, etc.

With 13.2 million views on X by Sunday evening, the video must have outperformed the Saudis’ wildest dreams, though, unfortunately, most of the views were caused by the viral storm of outrage that greeted the post. As an account called @WahabStatsHub lamented: “journalism is completely dead when the biggest football reporter is running paid pr campaigns for state sponsored initiatives the bag always wins in the end but the credibility is completely gone”.

For me the surprising thing about the story was not that Romano would do an ad for Saudi Arabia, but that there are a lot of people out there who consider him to be a “journalist” and to have had some kind of credibility in the first place.

With more than 100 million followers across social platforms, Romano is certainly the most famous person that could be described as a football reporter. This is not “reporting” as Seymour Hersh might understand the word. It’s not as though, were it not for Romano’s reporting, nobody would have ever found out that Bruno Fernandes had joined Manchester United. His following has been built on reporting transfer deals that are about to be announced anyway, and in most cases already have been announced by someone else. Credit to him for realising the vast commercial potential of what might initially sound an unpromising business model.

He has “credibility” in the sense that he is usually correct when he says that a transfer has taken place, to the extent that his catchphrase “Here we go” has become synonymous with the sealing of a deal. There are also instances of him getting it wrong (the worst of which was when he announced, without any qualification or cited source, that the Hatayspor player Christian Atsu had survived the February 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquake, when in fact he had been killed). But he keeps posting and the errors are quickly forgotten.

Speaking for myself, I have never found Romano interesting because he doesn’t say anything. I think the journalists worth paying attention to are giving you something more than “a club press release, but 10 minutes early”. In the best cases you feel you are learning something, whether it be new information about things that are happening that otherwise might not have come out, or a way to understand or interpret things you already know or feel are happening.

At a minimum they’re offering a point of view, which is something Romano scrupulously refuses to do. He never presents any analysis, opinion or judgment about the way the world of football works, or how it relates to the wider world.

He never expresses any ethical or political values or beliefs. A 2023 study by Dr Simon McEnnis at the University of Brighton found that in November 2022, Romano tweeted 494 times without mentioning the human rights issues surrounding the Qatar World Cup, which had kicked off that month.

His refusal to reflect, analyse or judge extends to the game itself. He doesn’t even say whether he thinks Player A is better than Player B. From Romano you learn nothing about the game, except what the fact of his success tells you about it.

To me, he is an influencer – ie a social media audience for hire – rather than a journalist. He has described himself as a journalist, but his understanding of what the word means may be different from yours or mine. Helpfully, he offered his own definition in a 2022 interview with the New York Times: “a journalist is an intermediary.”

“Intermediary” was a curious word to use. It usually means a paid go-between in a business deal. In the football context, the word “intermediary” means a football agent. If Romano sees the role of a journalist as similar to that of an agent, he’s sounding a bit like his own fiercest critics.

Actually, Romano’s success is an example of disintermediation - cutting out the middleman, in this case, “legacy” outlets such as Sky Sport Italia, for whom he worked for in the past. He saw he could be much more successful by becoming his own platform and dealing directly with brands and advertisers, rather than accepting fees to appear on platforms belonging to others.

That Romano carefully refrains from standing for anything, ever, is a business decision, evidently a wise one. He instinctively understands what you could call Hendo’s Law, after the ex-Liverpool star who was pilloried for moving to the Saudi Pro League in 2023.

Jordan Henderson was not the first Premier League player to move there, but he was the first to do so with a record of having spoken up for gay rights. This exposed him to the charge of hypocrisy, whereas if he had just avoided ever saying anything he would have been criticised as little as his old teammates Steven Gerrard, Roberto Firmino, Sadio Mané, Georginio Wijnaldum and Fabinho.

So, lesson one: never stand for anything, it limits your options. Follow this rule and you may find yourself doing an ad read suggesting that a human rights-abusing dictatorship is a champion of human rights, but in the end, who really cares?

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Lesson two: the concepts of credibility and trust in media must soon give way to universal scepticism. As war rages throughout the world, social media is dominated by mysterious accounts screaming lies at each other, supercharged by the new technology of generative AI, which has transformed Steve Jobs’s vision of “bicycles for the mind” into “rocket-engines for insanity”.

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Romano’s ad for Humanitarian Saudi was at least labelled #ad. If only every post could be so accurately labelled – #propaganda, #provocation, #ragebait, #lies, #slop, etc. By the standards of the coming dark age, Romano might some day seem an ethical champion.

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