The connection between paparazzi's aesthetics and football transfer journalism

The photo is taken from a distance, you can tell that the lens had been carefully positioned across the street, pointing straight at the window of a downtown restaurant. Half-hidden, perhaps from the back, one can see the protagonist of the photo at a table with other people, and whoever is behind the camera knows that the situation is strange, that it has the air of not just being a dinner party but rather a clue to something that needs to be discovered, or that will be discovered a few shots later. This is the ideal skeleton of a story involving paparazzi in search of some VIP's scoop, or the secret behind the football market indiscretion that will end up on the front page of the sports dailies a few hours later. 

The feeling is that in terms of aesthetics, dynamics and strategies, football market journalism has a lot to do with paparazzi journalism, that the photos of sports directors and agents in front of restaurants late at night, or outside the headquarters of foreign clubs are journalistically the one that is most closely linked to a world, that of scoops, now passed, or entrusted to some social video. For paparazzi and football market operators, every suspicion becomes a possibility, every photo breaks the flow of words, mystery and conditionals, in the quest to discover the end of the story before the protagonists reveal it. 

What's a social hint

When Serie A footballers and their affairs with TV showgirls were the stars of Italian gossip, footballers had to deal with the paparazzi world for a long time. The videos of the trials between Fabrizio Corona and Francesco Coco, Adriano or Gilardino are just one page of this connection, of which only the modalities are now left, now that the players seem to have become more cautious and the tale of life off the field less interesting for the gossip papers. Voyeurism is probably at the root of these two different news searches. In football, there is less of that feeling of entering people's private lives, and in recent years the morbidity towards VIPs is appeased by the continuous contact between the public and their private lives, of which we know where they are on holiday or which sponsor's event they are attending, perhaps together with whom. Preliminary research over the years has diminished the aggressiveness of the paparazzi but not the level of intrusiveness, which is the same as the journalists stationed outside the club ready to receive the usual insipid reply from the sports director on duty: 'We have known President X for years, it was just a normal dinner between old friends'.

In fact, the assault-style and 'market team' methods are not enough, the photo is the last proof, the vessel of officialdom to be brought to safety. And so the pictures in Sardinia to the prosecutor maintain that stolen shot aesthetic, in which the subjects are not always clear, grainy from the zoom and framed from afar, awkward while eating or carrying shopping bags. The photo is also important because if taken at the right time, during the launch of a season ticket campaign or a new jersey, it can make a difference for clubs, it can force decisions or last-minute raises. The photo is so important that we are constantly trying to replace it, and so the real novelty between the paparazzi of the Dolce Vita and those of the modern football market is the birth of the 'social clue', the ultimate social expression of voyeurism because it seems to come from a specialised observation with a magnifying glass, to discover something even when it is not there, just for the sake of salting a broth with a few ingredients.

Fabrizio Romano and Fabrizio Corona: the role of the insiders

The links between the way market teams operate and the paparazzi mean that there is no big difference between the protagonists. The insiders become famous in the same way, thanks to direct acquaintances in clubs or clubs, thanks to the ability to get at the indiscretion through good public relations, also achieved through a certain cult of personality. The jealousy of keeping everything to oneself until the right moment is another distinctive trait of these figures, always ready to be found casually in the right place at the right time when they can sell the photo to the newspaper or the gossipy Instagram page, or when they can publish that tweet that no one expected, punctuating the news with a few characters: footballer tag + themed emoji + new team tag + 'Here we go'.

The market experts work as a team but emerge as great individuals, just think Italy of Gianluca Di Marzio or Fabrizio Romano, journalists who have built an international status by the sound of market movements, working for media and television stations but always coming out as well-known names regardless of the channel in which they communicated this news. Compared to the paparazzi's first approach, the one aimed at VIPs from the 1960s onwards, one difference now is in the value of the final product of the investigation. The shots were a bargaining chip, papers to be sold at a high price, now the advent of 

The impatience to take the stage

Even though the opportunity for the scoop and to take compromising photos has become much more democratic, the search for paparazzi and market teams still has in common the exclusivity of being able to get to the news through coincidences and almost mysterious, sometimes elite relationships. Mundane parties and club venues are inaccessible places for almost everyone, so tweet or post from gossip account continues to arrive from time to time as unexpected lightning bolts because they have no basis other than to resemble speculation. In both the football-market journalism and the snapshot of the new celebrity couple, there is a desire to spoil the end of the story by finding out before the official announcement or the photo on the profile of those involved. The football market is guilty, much more than the paparazzi, of taking away the pleasure of the surprise effect, taking the scene before the teams, the prosecutors, the individual players and the fans choosing how to get the news and the resulting emotions. What these two phenomena have in common is impatience and a certain mania for protagonism, which starts from the other side of the street, with the camera at the ready and the same human need not to be able to wait for the end of the film.