I somehow ended up as a transfer ITK and it was a f*cking nightmare

Here we go! With more than 18million followers on Twitter X, it’s fair to say Fabrizio Romano has carved out a decent career for himself as a football transfers expert.

David Ornstein has got 2.5million followers, Gianluca Di Marzio has got 1.8mil…if you want a big, adoring following as a football journalist, transfers are the way to go.

So when I started to receive exclusive transfer news about my boyhood team just a couple of years into my career, I was well on the way to achieving everything I thought I wanted.

It soon became a f*cking nightmare.

I’d realised pretty much as soon as I became a journalist for TEAMtalk.com there was a big discrepancy between what people assumed I knew and what I actually knew – nothing, by the way – but it turned out it was much easier to know nothing than something.

Because, let me tell you, feed the Twitterati with a transfer titbit that comes off and you’ll soon realise there is no filling those hungry little bastards. Football fans are desperate to find out the latest news about their club and will smash you open like a piñata to get what they think you know.

The first time I did know something was back in 2007 when I heard my club, Stoke City, were trying to sign Richard Cresswell from Leeds. We were (still are) based there at TEAMtalk and half of my colleagues supported them so it was just office tittle-tattle basically.

But I published the story, it came off, and I had caught the bug like the naive fool I was.

It’s not quite the kind of exclusive that gets you Romano levels of followers, but it certainly earned me a bit of kudos among Stoke fans. All it takes is one – you might have stumbled across the info via the bloke in the pub or your next-door neighbour’s nan, but the second you