Why Is Soccer’s Most Famous Scoopster Doing PR Work For Mason Greenwood?

Over the weekend, as club soccer returned to action across Europe, new Marseille forward Mason Greenwood scored two goals in his side's 5-1 away victory over Brest. The former Manchester United player opened the scoring in the third minute and added a penalty in the 31st minute. As it was happening, soccer scoopster Fabrizio Romano posted on Twitter about both goals, and then added in a post about new Marseille manager Roberto De Zerbi's comments regarding Greenwood.

Devoid of context, there's nothing terribly strange about a soccer journalist tweeting about a good performance from a new signing. However, there is plenty of context in the Greenwood situation to make this feel much grosser than just idle posting on a Saturday.

One of the reasons Greenwood is at Marseille in the first place is due to his 2022 arrest following rape and assault allegations while he was at United. In now-deleted Instagram stories, Greenwood's partner shared graphic photos of herself bleeding from the mouth and with bruises on her body, as well as an audio recording of Greenwood attempting to force her to have sex with him. The initial post included the caption "To everyone who wants to know what Mason Greenwood does to me." Authorities dropped the charges in early 2023 after Greenwood's partner stopped cooperating with the investigation. Though United lifted Greenwood's suspension once the charges were dropped, he never suited up for the club again. While at first reluctant to heed the fan backlash against the homegrown player, the club eventually loaned Greenwood to Getafe in Spain last season and sold him to Marseille this summer. Unsurprisingly, Greenwood's past has not been forgotten. As ESPN reports, Brest fans booed the Englishman every time he touched the ball on Saturday.

What does this have to do with Romano's post? The world of scoopsters, across sports, is fraught with journalists navigating reporting the news while balancing agent relationships. Scoopsters rely on agents to provide information that the scoopsters break to the public or barter with other agents to hopefully acquire more information. Agents rely on scoopsters to privately share information the scoopster has attained from other agents or club staffers, and to disseminate choice bits of info publicly in order to influence public sentiment and to send messages to their clients' clubs or potential suitors. Becoming media literate in soccer requires reading a news item and trying to follow the hidden strings—who broke the news, which party leaked it, what end the news seems to serve—to its true source and motivation. This kind of reporting is often a dirty business full of back-scratching and ulterior motives, where the scoopster is beholden to nothing—not accuracy nor truth—more than he is to the continued maintenance of his relationships with his precious sources.

Which brings us back to Romano's tweets. Romano doesn't usually post much about on-field action, especially when the stakes are as small as a brace scored in a Ligue 1 opener. For comparison, throughout the opening weekend of the domestic seasons across Europe, Romano only tweeted about a couple other games—he noted Rodrygo's opening goal for Real Madrid, and posted twice about Manchester City's Erling Haaland, who scored the opener against Chelsea on Sunday—preferring instead to stick to his bread-and-butter of transfer news.

Romano's three tweets about Greenwood—and for the moment we can set aside the quote from De Zerbi in the last one, which shrinks a troubling and well-publicized sexual assault case into a nagging little "controversy in the media"—fit a larger trend in his changing coverage of the player. Romano did tweet about the initial sexual assault case, and also informed his followers when the case was dropped. From there, Greenwood was off to Getafe and mostly under Romano's radar.

Things began to change as last season came to an end. It started with a tweet noting that Greenwood had been named Getafe's player of the season, and that United would probably look to sell him in the upcoming transfer window, making the 22-year-old forward "one to watch." After a season in La Liga's midtable, Greenwood was apparently once again just a promising young player potentially on the move—the lifeblood of Romano's parasitic career.

From there, Romano started offering steady updates on Greenwood's exit from United. Those tweets fall more in line with his usual posting, but are notable for their frequency. Romano does tend to latch onto sub-blockbuster transfers from time to time, perhaps in those rare moments when he has a source of his own feeding him info rather than his usual "tap-in" approach, where he piggy-backs off other reporters' work only to add his trademark "Here we go!" catchphrase at the end, acting like he was at the forefront of the story all along. Once Marseille became the front-runner for Greenwood's signature, Romano fully shifted into his virality-baiting scoopster mode, dropping the eyes emoji, sharing video from Greenwood's arrival in Marseille after completing the move, and passing along another one of De Zerbi's nasty reputation-laundering quotes:

Breathless coverage of this sort is what you might expect for a star player, but Greenwood is not that. It's disproportionate for a player of his talent and production, especially when his highest-profile contribution to the sport to date was a controversy. Romano doesn't make mention of that, however; aside from the quotes from De Zerbi, the last time the reporter even hinted at the case was on March 1, when he shared some dismissive quotes from La Liga president Javier Tebas:

Again, it's hard to tell what's motivating all this triumphant coverage of an unproven player known best for being accused of rape. Is tweeting about Greenwood good for engagement and thus good for Romano's business? Does the Italian reporter have ties to the agents of Greenwood's new Italian manager, who might be willing to exchange future news for positive coverage of the controversial new player the manager is staking his reputation on? Does the fact that Greenwood hired a new agent earlier this year, whom Romano may want to curry favor with, have anything to do with this?

The uncertainty here is a feature, not a bug, of soccer's scoopster culture. The massive, lucrative industry that constantly churns out unreliable, inconsistent, sometimes wholly invented speculation about contract talks and transfer gossip relies on the uninformed masses taking it all at face value, no matter the news' intentionally obscured provenance. Romano's job is to tweet what he is told (or to pretend he's been told something someone else was told) and to conceal who told him it and why. Clearly, somebody has told Romano to keep tweeting good things about Greenwood, as if in an effort to repeatedly hammer his name into the typical "rise of a young superstar" narrative template until those pesky edges about violence against a woman fall away, at which point Greenwood will fit right into the story this somebody wants to sell. Whether that somebody is Greenwood's or De Zerbi's agent or simply the manifest incentives of the rumor mill itself doesn't matter all that much, since it doesn't change the fact that Romano is willfully complicit in a loathsome game.