Only when the shirt had been held aloft could you be sure a transfer was certain. Until that moment, the gossip column was king, while social media’s ITK accounts – that’s In The Know, though it could just as easily stand for Inside Transfer Knowledge – were pooh-poohed as speculative fluff. Well, that was the olden days. Football moves fast.
Supporters are now held captive by three little words, able to evoke euphoria, meltdown or a combination of both. Fabrizio Romano may be the world’s most famous sports journalist. At the time of writing, the rumour mill’s all-seeing eye has amassed 16.4 million followers on Twitter since he was a teenager – that’s not far off the whole population of the Netherlands – as football fans set their watches by his daily briefings and those three words: ‘Here We Go’.
