While Wearing An Orange Wig And A Big Red Foam Nose, Fabrizio Romano Insists He’s Not A Clown

If you are a soccer fan of any real commitment, then surely you’ve seen last week’s news that Real Madrid officially landed Ivorian winger (and former Florida high school student!) Yan Diomandé, prying him away from RB Leipzig with the considerable leverage exerted by €125 million. If you followed along with the transfer saga as it unfolded, you may have been surprised by how long the deal took to complete, considering that all credible reports said it has been all but tied up for almost two whole weeks. But transfers are complex animals, and are liable to come together or fall apart at any given moment for any number of reasons. A deal is never done until it is done. A lesson transfer obsessives have had occasion to relearn with the Diomandé affair, and which journo-influencer Fabrizio Romano himself has taken great pains to get people to forget, is that “Here we go” does not mean what you think it does.

For the uninitiated, Romano has achieved pride of place amongst soccer’s legion of scoopsters both with serious, downright Lainian connections to the transaction world’s movers and shakers, and with a total absence of shame or scruples. It’s those deep connections to agents and club execs that he calls upon to update his followers on the status of countless transfer deals throughout the process from rumor to completion. It’s that lack of shame or scruples that has earned him both massive popularity and an icky reputation for servility to power, rumor-mongering, inconsistent reliability, and piggybacking off the work of less renowned but more diligent reporters. As a water carrier for the interests of the game’s major players, he is peerless, like a kung fu movie’s martial arts novice at the end of his training montage, sprinting blindfolded at full speed up a craggy mountain path, nary a drop of water spilling from the two buckets suspended on either side of the bamboo stick he supports on his back. To express some measure of his omnipresence and shadiness in comparison to a similar figure in American sports media, he’s kind of like if Shams Charania’s first name were instead pronounced like its heteronym.

“Here we go” is Romano’s catchphrase. When he trots it out on social media, you are meant to understand that all the major parts of a transfer—the contractual agreement between player and acquiring club, and the fee agreement between selling club and acquiring club—have been accepted and all that remains is the final dotting of i’s and crossing of t’s. Along with being an effective and, from a journalist, embarrassingly gimmicky piece of personal branding, Romano’s Here We Go is supposed to bear the imprimatur of certainty. Sure, a deal could in theory still fall through at the very last moment for a small number of unforeseeable reasons, and they often do. Fans of most Premier League teams could fill a gallery wall with past Here We Goes that never came to fruition. And yet Romano wants you to read Here We Go as the final word before the final word, the prequel to a club’s imminent comunicado oficial.