Dr. Thomas Birkner
Full professor for Journalism at the University of Salzburg (Austria), Department of Communication. He teaches and conducts research on Journalism, Media and Sports, Political Communication and Media History.
Email: thomas.birkner@plus.ac.at
“Here we go!” – We were able to read this phrase also during the 2026 World Cup. This famous catchphrase and its author Fabrizio Romano embody a quite new phenomenon in modern sports communication, surrounding such mega sport events as the 2026 World Cup: transfer journalism. In a way, Romano epitomizes the shift from editorial sports journalism to influencers, or, as our colleague Simon McEnnis puts it: The Influencer-Sports Journalism of Fabrizio Romano. But he is only one of the most prominent figures in a field that is gaining ground in the sports media environment, especially in international soccer.
Of course, news about player transfers is, after all, almost as old as soccer itself. Nevertheless, transfer journalism is a relatively recent phenomenon in the world of international soccer. This has to do with several trends—some of which overlap—in the world of sports and the world of sports media alike. These include datafication, an increasing commercialization, and the platformization of the media. In his most recent book, German sports journalist Tobias Escher writes about the impact of artificial intelligence and big data in soccer. This trend is changing the training of the athletes and the knowledge about their skills, their measurable performance on and off the pitch and their potential impact on a new team’s performance in the event of a transfer. This has given a boost to transfer journalism just as much as the dramatic acceleration of real-time coverage in soccer. When Harry Kane, for example, was transferred from Tottenham Hotspur to Bayern Munich in 2023, the story was covered virtually every minute. What is problematic, from a professional and ethical perspective on sport news coverage: Transfer rumors travel as fast as facts in this media environment.
And social media platforms such as Instagram, X, YouTube, and Facebook have allowed not only clubs and organizations as FIFA to become their own content creators, bypassing traditional sports media, but also new actors in the business as sport media influencers. While we analyzed the coverage of The FIFA World Cup in Qatar in 2022 through a comparison of FIFA and journalistic media outlets, this time, in my seminar “The World Cup 2026 in the Media” at the University of Salzburg, we examined the event from several different perspectives, including podcasting, the players and the national soccer associations on Instagram, artificial intelligence in sports coverage, and the role of experts in TV coverage.
In the following, I will draw on preliminary findings from an analysis of transfer journalism during the 2026 World Cup, which my undergraduate students Martina Hammer, Felix Maierhofer, Senanur Özkan, and Jonas Stritzinger conducted as part of the seminar. They combined quantitative and qualitative analysis of three important transfer journalists (Fabrizio Romano, David Ornstein, Florian Plettenberg), based on theoretical concepts such as agenda setting, mediatization, and the hybrid media system by Andrew Chadwick. They compared the transfer journalism during the World Cup 2026 with the transfer journalism of the same period in 2025, and, not surprisingly, they found that the tournament is a real boost for transfer news coverage. Major events like a World Cup generate intense media attention, in which individual players quickly become highly visible figures. Players who stand out particularly well in such a tournament are more likely to become the subject of transfer rumors, because media attention is already focused on them. The World Cup thus acts as a catalyst for transfer journalism. It creates a window of opportunity in which athletic performance, changes in market value, and transfer rumors are particularly closely intertwined.
Another finding is that language becomes significantly more emotional during the World Cup. Transfer rumors are transformed into stories worth telling. This is particularly relevant in the context of the World Cup, because players are already on a stage that is highly charged with symbolic significance. Their performances are reported in a more emotional way and transformed into stories of rise, breakthrough, and discovery.
And transfer journalists on X generally work faster, with a sharper focus, and are more event-driven than traditional sports media. In a World Cup year, this difference becomes particularly apparent because there is enough public attention to reward high-impact formats even more strongly and the transfer journalists’ communication is geared towards exclusivity, speed, and immediate reaction.
To sum up: transfer journalism operates at the intersection of sports journalism, rumor-mongering, real-time journalism, platform logics, and strategic communication. While transfer reports used to be primarily a seasonal phenomenon, they are now a media product in their own right, with their own actors and routines. This becomes particularly evident when looking at a mega event such as a World Cup in soccer, and makes it a relevant subject for communication and journalism research, especially since there has been little systematic research to date on how this sub-genre functions and what impact it has on professional soccer and its audience.
