The man who brought questionable media focus to a player accused of rape has released an explicit #advertisement about Saudi Arabia.
Football scoop Fabrizio Romano took a break from the many betting app ads and Super Mario commercials to read a two-minute ad from the King Salman Humanitarian Aid & Relief Centre, a Saudi Arabian government agency that focuses on humanitarian relief around the world. It’s uncomfortable to see ads without any context. Romano jumps into the script without any preface and begins listing numbers and projects. It’s truly bizarre to see a football journalist start gleefully gushing about government institutions while talking about landmines in Yemen and later about conjoined twins that aid groups helped separate. All of this is a disaster, but there’s something perversely appealing about hearing Romano say “540,000 mine” in the same tone he uses when talking about transfer fees. The only thing missing was his trademark “Here we go!” Catchphrase.
Cutting paid promotions for a state-sponsored organization would be embarrassing under any circumstances, but especially so considering Romano’s position. Accepting a check from Saudi Arabia is a poor and shameful decision for anyone, but Romano is not some dumb comedian trying to justify a joke in Riyadh. He is ostensibly a journalist who constantly covers the Saudi professional league, and now he is the one who has no choice but to question that reporting to his followers. For example, here is an interview he conducted: men wearing blazers December’s show of how well the Saudi league is selling quality of life to its players started quite differently now that Romano knows he’s getting paid.
(It’s important to point out here that what Romano is talking about in the interview is the exterior. Saudi Arabia has invested a lot of effort and a lot of money to create a place where European soccer stars can come and live like royalty, but that only works as long as the exterior holds up. It’s wallpaper hiding the rough interior, and it’s been peeling off for some time now.)
It doesn’t matter whether Romano filmed this promo just to get a check or because he was actually buying Saudi Arabian propaganda. Either way, he is selling his credibility to a country that wants to use football, among other enterprises, to launder its international reputation. It is a minor coup for the country, then, for a prominent football figure to promote his preferred narrative as a force for good in the world while uncritically regurgitating statistics that cast Saudi Arabia in a positive way. Is the timing of this ad a coincidence, with the joint US-Israeli attack on Iran and growing instability in the Middle East? Almost certainly not.
Who can take Romano’s reporting on Saudi Arabia seriously now? That’s the whole point of having a scooter in the first place. If your only job is to beat everyone else in every transfer story, there’s no need to have a point of view, no matter how irrelevant. If that means recording soulless promotional material in exchange for a wad of cash and putting ethics aside, so be it.
