The World's Most Influential Football Journalist, Gianluca di Marzio | Top 10 Football Transfer Gurus

25 Nov, 2020

Gianluca di Marzio is arguably one of the most influential transfer gurus there is.

In 2015 ESPN made a list of the 50 most influential people in football, the Italian journalist and transfer guru got rated 39 on that list, ahead of folks like Pele, Philippe Blatter and Arsène Wenger!

Furthermore, the 45-year-old Italian has over 1.1 million followers on Twitter and 313k followers on Instagram, which proves that he is a popular man in football.

Primarily he works for Sky Sports, where he mostly writes about the Serie A’s latest transfer news, as well as some of the biggest transfers worldwide.

HOW HE FELL IN LOVE WITH THE SPORT

Gianluca fell in love with football at an early age, essentially because of his father, Gianni di Marzio.

Gianni had a deep passion for the sport, even though as a player he never became anything more than a decent midfielder and retired at the age of 24 because of an injury.

But he didn’t give up football because of that, after the injury he followed a coaching path instead, which he got pretty good at!

He became the head coach of clubs like Napoli, Palermo and Catania, earning promotion to the Serie B, Serie A and second place in the Italian Cup!

After his coaching career he had multiple different roles in the game of football, such as sporting director, club advisor and most notably, scouting.

He is known for being the person that spotted Diego Maradona at the age of 17, and the main reason that he later joined Napoli.

From 2001-2006 he was in charge of the transfers for Juventus, and while working there he spotted another brilliant 17-year-old as well, perhaps you’ve heard of him, his name is Cristiano Ronaldo.

He was extremely close to signing the Portuguese superstar to Juventus, as he tried to push through a swap deal between him and Juventus striker Marcelo Sala.

The problem was that Sala refused to move to Lisbon, and unfortunately for Juventus, the deal was blown away.

Gianluca followed his father around everywhere while he was working, which gave him a broad network and a great overall understanding of how the entire football community works.

Different from his father, Gianluca never really pursued a football career as a player, neither as a scout or a sports director, he has more or less stayed in the footballing journalism lane his whole life.

As he said himself in an interview with Sky Sports:

“I didn’t chase a dream that I wouldn’t have realised. But I had a way with words, I liked writing, I was curious, so from there the football and journalism combo was ever-present.”

TRANSFERS AND DEADLINE DAYS

He started working in Sky Sports from a relatively young age, and after a couple of years in the business he was sent to do his first report on the transfer market at 30 years of age.

Straight away he developed a deep passion for the transfer market and has been working on them every year since.

As of today, he covers the “Sky in Italy’s” transfer stories and you could say that he has established himself as an actual brand in the transfer world.

Gianluca says that his biggest dream is to see an international deadline day, which is held by a different city every year.

His dream is that everyone has an aligned transfer deadline and that representatives from all the important clubs are hosted on TV’s around the world. This just shows Gianluca di Marzio’s obsession with transfers and deadline days.

BREAKING THE NEWS OF THE PEP GUARDIOLA AND ALISSON BECKER SIGNINGS

All the first rumblings about a transfer in the Serie A are coming from Gianluca, as well as some of the biggest signings worldwide.

One example was back in 2013, when there was wide expectation of Pep Guardiola becoming the head coach of Manchester City.

Gianluca was the first reliable journalist that broke the news of Pep Guardiola’s agreement with Bayern München instead of Manchester City, forcing Bayern München to come with a confirmation statement 48 hours later.

A more recent example of Gianluca breaking news and creating a tilt in the media, was the signing of Alisson Becker to Liverpool in 2018.

He was one of the first journalists to announce that Liverpool had made an enquiry with Rome about Alisson, and we know that Gianluca’s statements are rarely – if ever, wrong.

MORE TRANSFER NEWS COMING!

If you want to read up on daily football news (mostly Serie A), Gianluca also has his own website, where he is fairly active and posts news and agreements every day.

You could easily say that the transfer market wouldn’t be the same without the famed Italian Transfer Guru, Gianluca di Marzio.