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.

Issues arise when a Here We Go goes wrong. Take the Diomandé case. Coming off a great club season with Leipzig and an impressive showing with Ivory Coast at the 2026 World Cup, Diomandé was always going to be one of the most coveted prizes of this summer's transfer window. Before the World Cup was even over, a flurry of rumors in June linked Diomandé to the likes of Liverpool and Paris Saint-Germain, as Romano dutifully reported. However, by July 24, reports had it that Liverpool and PSG had essentially backed out of negotiations, and Real Madrid, per the rumors a relative newcomer to the Diomandé sweepstakes, had swooped in and become the favored suitor. Romano sent his own flurry of tweets updating the status of this rapidly moving situation, all culminating on July 26 with his famous Here We Go and one of those tacky Photoshop jobs he's always putting out, with a Real jersey digitally painted onto Diomandé's body.

The problem is that not everyone agreed with Romano's assessment of the deal's status. Namely, German scoopster Florian Plettenberg clearly took issue with Mr. Here We Go's here-we-going, pushing back on Romano's reporting with a subtweet. It read:

There is still NO agreement (or in principle) between RB Leipzig and Real Madrid. This continues to be confirmed by ALL parties involved in these seconds again.

The reality is that some always want to be first. That’s fine. But just because PSG have now officially withdrawn and Real are the only club left in the race, we’re not going to publish a pseudo “agreement” or “DONE DEAL”.

At Sky, we’ll report the DONE DEAL once RB and Real have actually reached a real agreement. And when that happens, you’ll get the exact transfer fee as well.

Spicy! And it was only the start!

Not long after Plettenberg's initial subtweet, Romano entered the replies of a subsequent Plettenberg subtweet to defend himself. (Romano is famously thin-skinned and responds aggressively to criticism. We at Defector are familiar with this first-hand, seeing as Romano called up and yelled at our very own Luis Paez-Pumar after Luis took him to task in a blog.) In response to someone characterizing Plettenberg's subtweets as a "war" between the two scoopsters, Romano wrote "I’m not into any war my friend. There were reports of Man City ready to bid €100m for Diomande literally yesterday (!) and Man City are completely out since 8 days ago. And they still talk about others. Let it go… but don’t involve me 😁 Diomande will go to Real Madrid. Here we go. Enjoy."

Plettenberg replied directly to Romano's own subliminal diss, kicking off an entertaining spat that spanned two separate Twitter threads. Some highlights include Romano accusing Plettenberg of "fake news"; Plettenberg calling a separate Romano report, from when Jürgen Klopp was in negotiations to become the new Germany manager, "simply ridiculous and disrespectful to every journalist who does actual reporting," and saying Romano jumps the gun on posting Here We Go based not on hard information but rather "based on probability" as part of his efforts to game social media algorithms; and Romano hitting Plettenberg with the equivalent of the "you a fan" line from "Ether."

Plettenberg was doubly right. Romano isn't so much in the reporting business as he is in the influencer industry, and being a good influencer is all about monopolizing attention by hook or by crook. It's not for nothing that Romano's social media pages are chock full of empty speculation, micro- or even non-updates on moves in progress, aggregation of other reporters' scoops (with or without attribution), interview quotes, injury reports, and other assorted news items, with only the occasional actual breaking of real news. He wants to be the one-stop shop for all things soccer, and since soccer is a transactions game, he's tried to make himself synonymous with the transaction. Transfer rumors are addictive, but they are also already over-supplied by the market. What is most valuable is certainty, the ability to sift through the mountains of gossip and, with authority, say "this one is real" or "this is one about to happen." That is why Here We Go is so important to his brand. But the thing is, his here-we-goes are hardly definitive.

There again, the Diomandé case is instructive. A couple hours after the Plettenberg-Romano dust-up kicked off, David Ornstein came in with his own report, which backed Plettenberg's contention that the deal between Leipzig and Real, though very likely to eventually go through, was still firmly in the negotiation stage. Ornstein is the gold standard of transaction reporting, something like the anti-Romano. His scoops are unfailingly reliable, and he only weighs in on something when he has something new and definitive to add. Ornstein is too serious a reporter to participate in the kind of Twitter fighting Plettenberg was engaging in, but it felt telling that he put out his own report in the thick of the beef, with the implication that he too was participating in taking Romano, a controversial figure even in the often hacky world of soccer reporting, down a peg.

And Plettenberg and Ornstein were clearly right! Romano here-we-goed the Diomandé transfer on July 26, adding that the winger was set to fly to Madrid "this week" to sign the contract. Diomandé did not in fact seal his move to Real until Aug. 6, 11 days later. In between that time, all sorts of stories came out reporting on the little hiccups holding up the deal—most intriguingly, this report from French journalist Romain Molina, which sketched the complex web of agent problems that have apparently played a big part in Diomandé's somewhat odd career trajectory, and which reportedly caused confusion about who was owed what in the mooted Diomandé transfer. As each day passed, the soccer internet delighted in rubbing Romano's nose in his own mess. Nobody got in on the action better than Leipzig itself. In a preseason press conference on Aug. 3, Marcel Schafer, the club's sporting director, commented on Diomandé's situation, saying "It's clear that some so-called transfer experts reported a few days ago that the deal was done or gave it the 'here we go.' That's simply not the case." When the deal finally did go through, Leipzig announced it on Twitter by writing "HERE WE ACTUALLY GO."

For his part, Romano was clearly annoyed by the embarrassment, and dealt with it in that typical internet way: insisting that he was not mad and thereby confirming it. The Italian had a good time reposting aggregations of his own "news" in an effort to shore up his reputation by restating it himself. He also made a habit of replying directly to Twitter randos, either yukking it up with ones defending him or arguing with ones making fun of him. Then we got the "exclusive" photo he posted to reassert his credibility, snapped straight from the jet that took Diomandé from Austria to Spain when the transfer was ready to go through, as if it weren't already glaringly obvious that Romano's sources all along were Diomandé's agents, whom he'd provided his elite water-carrying services by reporting that a deal that wasn't done was done. I think my favorite of his self-defenses was this selfie video he made when more reliable reports said the deal finally was on the doorstep of completion. He spends the first 30 seconds or so just reiterating that the deal is about to go through, sneakily sprinkling in little convenient justifications for the delay to make it seem like he had been right all along, before ending the video with about seven not-at-all-insecure send-off sentences: "Never in doubt. Yan Diomandé. To Real Madrid. Here we go. Is 100 percent confirmed. And never in doubt."

To be fair, it's not that Romano is completely in the wrong. There really is value in reporting when a deal enters the all-but-done stage, and that reporting isn't necessarily discredited when the deal subsequently gets scuppered. Over a long enough timeline, every scoopster will get burned by a failed medical. In addition, he's right when he says that he doesn't always get the acknowledgement when he genuinely does break news. Even Romano's haters have to admit that he sometimes comes up with something nobody else had a bead on, and it can be too easy to forget about those times when laughing at his overall shtick.

But at the core of the issue is the bizarre place in the media ecosystem Romano has carved for himself. Romano often wants to have it both ways, to be considered a serious journalist when it comes time to soberly assess his reporting, but then to also be considered just an entertainer who shouldn't be judged for throwing around silly catchphrases, for allowing himself to be used as a puppet, and for making ads with anybody who cuts him a check. If people "misunderstand" his Here We Goes, it's only because his sensationalistic and intentionally misleading usage of it, in combination with his general clownish behavior, has trained people to understand it a certain way. A useful contrast could be seen in the Diomandé saga reporting of Plettenberg and Ornstein, none of which different so substantially from Romano's (all agreed that the parties involved were all but certain to eventually reach an accord) except for the very sensationalism that makes Romano's posts so shareable, popular, and misleading.

If Romano has anyone to be mad at, it's only himself. Then again, Romano doesn't really have much reason to be mad. By all the metrics he most cares about, he is wildly successful, and really has made his social media accounts the most convenient conveyor belts for soccer info. Getting there may have cost him his dignity and the respect of his more respected peers, but presumably he considers that a small price to pay for all the money he's raking in as the game's preeminent journo-influencer. All I ask is that if you're going to act like a clown, don't start trying to pretend you're not in fact a clown when everyone laughs at you.