FABRIZIO Romano, the transfer guru journalist who caps off each signing with his famous “here we go” confirmation, is earning hundreds of pounds every time he tweets.

He gets it right most of the time, has built a huge following, and is said to collect £1million from posting on X each year alone.

Fair enough, at least he is getting reliable information – but the pound-shop imitators chasing the same dollars are really polluting the web and social media.

I can tell you from the Tribune’s own metrics that putting the word “Arsenal” into the headline of any story will lead to more clicks and visibility than some of the serious campaigns and investigations the paper dutifully conducts.

And so it is that titles which are more ruthless about how many people they need to lure into their websites each day are posting any transfer rumour about Arsenal, no matter what the reality is.

The huge demand for anything Arsenal-related means people are endlessly searching up the club’s name in the hope that the news tab will tell them that new players will soon be arriving.

This is the desperate merry-go-round that football journalism risks becoming. The obsessive internet searcher always being fed half-true stories and articles which hook in the unwitting with headlines like: “Everybody is saying the same thing about what Martin Odegaard did against Ipswich” or “Mikel Arteta’s five word response was just perfect”.

There’s a skill to it, I guess, but it’s not journalism and you will have to fish through pages and pages of the internet to find anything sane and illuminating about the club’s likely next steps.

So, as the transfer window opens and your football news search gets more and more infected by the mundane, why don’t we all try to go for a dry January on football gossip this year.

For 31 days, no sharing links in WhatsApp to ludicrous rumours which are obviously false.

No clicking on stories with headlines like: “Former England star names the player Arsenal must sign.” No refreshing any football news page within a 12-hour period.

If we get through January, we might all be able to kick the addiction completely.